Swann, Adam (2014) 'Nature’s coyn must not be hoorded': Milton and
the economics of salvation, 1634-1674. PhD thesis.
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‘Nature’s coyn must not be hoorded’:
Milton and the Economics of Salvation, 1634-1674
Adam Swann
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Ph.D. in English Literature
School of Critical Studies
College of Arts
University of Glasgow
January 2014
2
Abstract
Milton’s use of economic tropes has attracted very little critical attention, and the
connections between economics and theology in his thought have not yet been explored.
Blair Hoxby’s Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002)
focuses on the influence of economic ideas on Milton’s political thought, arguing that the
poet persistently associates trade monopolies with autocratic abuses of monarchical power.
David Hawkes places Milton’s lifelong professional usury at the centre of his 2009
biography, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, and his 2011 essay, ‘Milton and Usury,’
fruitfully reads key passages from Paradise Lost in relation to contemporary tracts on
usury. Hoxby and Hawkes have astutely highlighted the relationship between economics
and Milton’s thought, but neither scholar has pursued these connections into Milton’s
theology. Economic ideas lie at the very heart of Milton’s soteriology, and my thesis offers
a historicised investigation of Milton’s corpus, demonstrating that the tropes of
contemporary economic thought were crucial to his understanding of sin and, more
importantly, salvation.
Chapter 1 traces the roots of this economic soteriology to the economic and
theological treatises of the 1620s and early 1630s, which argued that money must be not
stockpiled but circulated, and that salvation was a transaction between man and God.
Chapter 2 considers how Ben Jonson and George Herbert, whose work Milton was familiar
with in his youth, used The Staple of Newes (1626) and The Temple (1633) to respond to
contemporary developments in economic and theological thought. Chapter 3 reads
Milton’s early works as studies of hoarding and consumption, traced through the debate
over sexual stockpiling in Comus (1634), the sinfulness of a hoarding nation in the History
of Moscovia (early 1640s), and the clergy torn between their compulsions to covet and
consume in Of Reformation (1641). Chapter 4 finds in Gerrard Winstanley’s Fire in the
Bush (1650) an explicitly economic understanding of the Fall, and demonstrates how
Milton’s political and religious writings of the 1650s betray an anxiety that the English
cannot govern their economic appetites and, therefore, themselves. Chapter 5 examines
how Milton uses tropes of investment, profit, loss, and repayment in the Christian Doctrine
and Paradise Lost (1667) to represent redemption as a transaction between Jesus and God
on man’s behalf. Chapter 6 reads the History of Britain (1670) as an indictment of
isolationist economic policies, with Milton demonstrating that free interactions between
peoples facilitate national refinement, and thus strangers become saviours.
3
Contents
Abstract
2
Acknowledgements
4
A Note on Editions
5
Introduction
7
Chapter 1 – ‘The husbandman in the seed-time … casteth away
23
much good corn into the ground’: Early SeventeenthCentury Economic and Theological Thought
Chapter 2 – ‘Is the ballance thine?’: Jonson, Herbert, and the
61
Capitulation to Commodification
Chapter 3 – ‘Golden Chalices and wooden Preists’: The Service
95
of God and Mammon
Chapter 4 – ‘Nothing now stands in the way of Englishmen, but
128
inward covetousness’: Winstanley, Milton, and
Self-Government in the 1650s
Chapter 5 – ‘Account mee man’: The Price of Redemption in
145
the Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost
Chapter 6 – ‘As Wine and Oyl are Imported to us from abroad:
166
so must ripe Understanding, and many civil Vertues’:
The Fallen State in the History of Britain
Conclusion
193
Bibliography
195
4
Acknowledgements
As this thesis was started at one university and finished at another, I must begin by
thanking two pairs of supervisors. The early stages of my research were made less
daunting by Jonathan Sawday and Alison Thorne at Strathclyde University, whose
judicious nudges helped me recognise which avenues were worth pursuing and which were
not. Willy Maley and Donald Mackenzie at Glasgow University helped me along the
cragged and steep path towards completion, and I am deeply grateful for both their
enthusiasm when my own was waning and their patience when my progress was slow. I am
thankful to Willy for inviting me to collaborate with him on two other essays, which I hope
will be the first of many. It was also a pleasure to teach alongside Donald in the ‘Writing
the English Revolution’ seminars, and running through Milton’s corpus during this module
proved very useful as my submission deadline approached.
I am beholden to my examiners, Rob Maslen and Gordon Campbell, whose
meticulous comments saved me from numerous infelicities; any remaining errors are my
own. Preliminary portions of this thesis were presented at conferences and seminars in
Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Boston, Toronto, and Oxford, and I am obliged to the
participants for their insightful comments and suggestions. The staff at the Strathclyde and
Glasgow University Libraries were immensely helpful, and I am especially grateful to the
indefatigable interlibrary loans teams for tracking down a number of obscure requests.
I am also indebted – both literally and figuratively – to my family, without whose
unwavering support I could not have completed this thesis. While Raisin and Simon
Johnson will never understand that they have been mentioned here, I am grateful for their
knowing when to chew my notes and when to just fall asleep in my lap. Most of all, I
would like to thank Anikó, who never once complained about all the late nights I spent
with Milton instead of her. This thesis is dedicated to her, with love.
5
A Note on Editions
Milton’s prose works are quoted from Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953-82), and cited parenthetically as CPW by
volume and page number.
Paradise Lost is quoted from Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (London: WileyBlackwell, 2007), and cited parenthetically as PL by book and line number.
Milton’s English poetry and Comus are quoted from Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P.
Revard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and cited parenthetically by title and line
number.
Milton’s Latin poetry is quoted from John Milton, Milton’s Latin Poems, trans. David R.
Slavitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), and cited parenthetically by
title and line number.
Herbert’s poetry is quoted from The Temple: A Diplomatic Edition of the Bodleian
Manuscript (Tanner 307), ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English
Text Society, 1995), and cited parenthetically by title and line number.
Jonson’s Staple of Newes is quoted from Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and
Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), and cited parenthetically by act, scene,
and line number.
Winstanley’s works are quoted from Complete Works, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes,
and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and cited parenthetically
as WCW by volume and page number.
All biblical quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the Authorised Version.
Where possible, I have quoted primary texts from editions which preserve original spelling
and punctuation, although for ease of transcription and reading I have silently modernised
i/j, v/u, and ſ/s, and expanded superscript contractions.
6
We must draw out the bill of our receipts and expences. The bills of receipt are
framed thus: we must call to remembrance what graces, blessings, and gifts we
have received of God, whether temporall or spirituall … our bills of expences …
are nothing els, but large considerations of our owne sinnes … Tradesmen for their
temporal estates, keepe in their shoppes bookes of receipts and expences: shall not
we then much more doe the like for our spirituall estates?
– William Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, or, Callings of Men (1603, 131)
7
Introduction
In the title of his 2004 essay, Paul Harrison asked ‘What Can We Learn for Today from
300-Year-Old Writings about Stock Markets?’ In a country which is lurching from one
economic crisis to the next, where universities are run by economists and the government
is rife with enough cronyism and financial mismanagement to make a Stuart monarch
envious, the question is timely indeed.1 The dire financial situation in Europe continues to
provide a ready source of political capital for right-wing parties, and UKIP’s gains in the
2013 English local elections suggest that isolationist rhetoric is resonating with voters.2
The idea that England’s interests must be protected was a recurrent trope of seventeenthcentury political and economic discourse, and ailing economies have recently been
buttressed with protectionist policies which would not have been out of place in the early
modern period.3
The other end of the political spectrum is also finding inspiration in the seventeenth
century. To mark both the first anniversary of the Occupy camp in St. Paul’s and the 365th
anniversary of the Putney Debates, Occupy London organised a series of New Putney
Debates, some of which took place in the same church as the original debates in 1647
(Buick 2012, 17). One of the debates on land and democracy took as its starting point
Winstanley’s assertion that the ‘earth was a common storehouse for all’ (WCW 2:5), and
Joad Raymond maintains that Winstanley ‘is important again in 2012 as a symbol of
opposition to corporate irresponsibility, of the roots of socialism in the British labouring
classes, of the affinity between communitarian sensibility and the protection of the
environment, and of the indispensability of practical utopianism’ (2012, 429). While for
Paul Stevens ‘one of the central present-day failings of our culture … is its public sphere’s
extraordinarily short memory span’ (2008, 27), it seems that some of us, at least, have
flashes of recollection.
David Hawkes has recently attempted to jog our memory by opening his biography
John Milton: A Hero of Our Time with the claim that ‘Milton should be judged by the
1
I concur with Paul Stevens: ‘that scholarship is driven, at least in part, by present-day concerns is of course
both inescapable and not necessarily a bad thing’ (2012, 152).
2
However, Nigel Farage’s ignominious escape from protesters in Edinburgh in May and UKIP’s dismal
results in the Aberdeen Donside by-election in June suggests that not everyone is convinced.
3
The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2009, to ‘protect against import surges,’ the U.S. levied ‘tariffs of
up to 35% on Chinese tires.’ China responded by complaining to the WTO that the tariffs were
‘protectionist,’ before announcing ‘a series of duties on U.S. chicken, nylon, and other exports’ (Williamson
and Barkley 2010). Dimitri Uzunidis and Blandine Laperche have recently argued that ‘the current economic
crisis can be linked with mercantilist practices’ (2011, 373), while David F. Cwik describes twenty-first
century currency manipulations as the ‘third wave’ of mercantilist protectionism (2011, 7).
8
standards of the twenty-first century’ (2009, 3). ‘Capitalist society,’ Hawkes argues, ‘is
idolatrous to a degree surpassing the worst nightmares of seventeenth-century iconoclasts’
(2009, 8). Moreover, we live in an age of ubiquitous wage slavery, which is ‘not
necessarily unpleasant, and … can often be rather lucrative, but it is nevertheless
piecemeal slavery, because it involves the alienation of our activity, albeit on a temporary
and voluntary basis’ (Hawkes 2009, 9). Milton believed that ‘idolatry was slavery’ and
‘prescribe[d] iconoclasm as life’s most basic principle’ (Hawkes 2009, 9; 11). If these are
the times, this, surely, is the man.
But we must remember that while Milton may offer a means of critiquing capitalist
society, he was himself ‘the most actively capitalist of any English poet’ (Hawkes 2009,
260). Milton was an archetypal capitalist, living as he did throughout his life from the
sweat of other men’s brows. Usury was the family trade, practiced first by Milton’s father
and then by the poet himself. Hawkes observes the ‘remarkable fact that both the towering
geniuses of early modern English literature, Milton and Shakespeare, were the sons of
usurers’ (2009, 28), and the latter has attracted considerable attention from ‘new economic
criticism.’
New economic criticism is so named to distinguish itself from the ‘first wave of
economic criticism, which appeared during the late 1970s and early 1980s’ and drew on
‘deconstruction, semiotics, and the other formalist approaches that prevailed’ during that
period (Osteen and Woodmansee 1999, 2). Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature (1978)
gestured towards the new economic criticism with its claim that ‘literary works are
composed of small tropic exchanges or metaphors, some of which can be analysed in terms
of signified economic content and all of which can be analysed in terms of economic form’
(1993, 7). Since then, the ‘critical pendulum’ of literary studies ‘has decidedly swung back
toward historicist methods,’ and the early 1990s saw ‘an emerging body of literary and
cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes’ which began to
identify itself as the ‘new economic criticism’ towards the end of the decade (Osteen and
Woodmansee 1999, 2).
While ten years ago Ivo Kamps could say ‘the nexus between economic and
quantitative language and the language of literature continues to be neglected’ (2003, vii),
the past five years have been particularly productive in this regard.4 Recent new economic
4
See, for instance, Stephen Deng and Barbara Sebek, eds., Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of
Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1500 to 1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Peter F.
9
criticism has moved beyond merely unpicking images of commerce in literary texts and is
becoming more acutely historicised, with scholars now exploring the manifestations of
specific seventeenth-century economic theories in literary texts. This new approach
appears particularly attractive to scholars of early modern tragicomedy, as Richard Kroll’s
Restoration Drama and ‘The Circle of Commerce’: Tragicomedy, Politics, and Trade in
the Seventeenth Century (2007) and Valerie Forman’s Tragicomic Redemptions: Global
Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (2008) both examine tragicomic writers’
engagement with the idea of the ‘circle of commerce,’ a concept advanced in the 1620s by
the economic thinker Edward Misselden.
Barbara Sebek recently observed that ‘economic activity can hardly be isolated
from political, religious, and other discourses, especially in [the early modern] period’
(2008, 4–5), and this is evident in the way the body politic was literalised in the economic
debates of the 1620s, with the circulation of money and commodities occupying a central
position in such discussions. Kroll’s observation that the economic thinkers Edward
Misselden and Thomas Mun agreed in the 1620s that ‘the East India trade [was] no cause
for alarm … because to permit flows of goods in and out of the nation is to produce
wealth’ (2007, 45) makes explicit the ‘physiological presumptions inhabiting the discourse
of trade’ (2007, 7).5 The idea that these debates literalised the body politic is perceptive,
but Kroll’s further assertion that Misselden and Mun’s interest in ‘systems of credit that
bind … traders in Europe, the Levant, India, and the Spice Islands … clearly put pressure
on physiology proper to develop a full theory of circulation’ (2007, 7), implying as it does
some causal link between these debates and William Harvey’s ‘announcing his discovery
of the circulation of blood’ (2007, 37) in De moto cordis (1628), seems tenuous.
Nonetheless, Kroll’s discussion ranges from Davenant to Dryden to convincingly connect
economic circulation with tragicomic plots, which are often resolved ‘by money or objects
returning literally or symbolically to their point of origin’ (2007, 1).
Forman develops these ideas of economic circulation further, arguing that
tragicomedy is not just about reimbursement, but profit. Like Kroll, her starting point is the
economic debates of the 1620s:
Grav, Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: “What’s Aught But As ‘Tis Valued?” (London: Routledge,
2008), Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Political and Economic Language: A Dictionary (London:
Continuum, 2008), and David Landreth, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance
Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012).
5
I discuss Misselden and Mun’s ideas at length in Chapter 1.
10
new economic practices required the English to reconceptualise loss itself as
something productive. Early modern economic theories are thus somewhat Janusfaced. They seriously engage with loss, but they also imagine those losses to be
only temporary and ultimately transformable. Moreover, in these theories losses are
re-envisioned as the source of something beneficial and positively valenced. (2008,
1)
Tragicomedy as a genre ‘is the product of a relationship between two potentially opposing
genres – one that foregrounds loss, and the other resolution,’ and Forman argues that
‘tragicomedy finds its narrative and structural basis in Christian redemption (the felix
culpa), in which the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve produces the coming and
sacrifice of Christ’ (2008, 1; 7). The common ground between Christian redemption and
economic investment is that ‘the beginning (loss/expenditure) transforms into a different
ending (profit/capital accumulation)’ (Forman 2008, 15). However, Forman maintains
there is a crucial difference: economic investment imagines the transformation of loss into
profit from the very beginning, and the investment is carried out with the expectation that
the profit can be reinvested in the future. The Fall, conversely, ‘is fortunate retroactively,
that is, when viewed from an end point, and it is not to be repeated’ (Forman 2008, 15).
While this may indeed be the case in the biblical account of the Fall, we shall see that in
Paradise Lost Eve ‘invests only because [she] anticipates a profit (in part because such an
event has been repeated before,’ a description Forman reserves for the ‘strictly economic
version’ alone (2008, 15).
While new economic criticism is proving useful to scholars of both tragicomedy
and Shakespeare, what of that other usurer’s son, Milton? Critical discussions of Milton
and economic matters have been scant until relatively recently. Peter Lindenbaum’s
articles on the details of Milton’s contract with Samuel Simmons for the publication of
Paradise Lost (1992; 1997) provide insight into the practical side of Milton’s economic
life, and since the contract is ‘the first such formal contract between author and publisher
on record’ (Lewalski 2003, 453), Milton ‘has claim to be considered our earliest modern
professional author’ (Lindenbaum 1992, 454).6 Since the eighteenth century Miltonists
have considered the terms of the Paradise Lost contract – that Milton was to receive £5
initially and £5 more at the end of each of the first three editions – to be ‘a poor
6
For a recent, detailed discussion of Milton’s contract for Paradise Lost, see Kerry MacLennan, “John
Milton’s Contract for Paradise Lost: A Commercial Reading,” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2010): 221–230.
11
consideration … for such an inestimable performance’ (Newton 1749, 1:xxxvii, quoted in
Lindenbaum 1997, 9). But Lindenbaum’s unpicking of the contract reveals that Milton was
actually a canny negotiator. The contract includes stipulations which ensured that Simmons
did not gain profits disproportionate to Milton’s royalties, and Milton was entitled to
request accounts of Simmons’s sales, with a £5 forfeit due from Simmons if these were not
provided (Lindenbaum 1997, 14–15). Contrary to the image of Milton constructed in the
eighteenth century as an otherworldly artist disconnected from daily life, Lindenbaum
demonstrates that he was ‘firmly attached to life in this physical world’ and ‘a poet fully
immersed in the material culture of his time’ (Lindenbaum 1997, 15).
While Lindenbaum established that Milton was attuned to the realities of economic
life, it was Blair Hoxby who first looked at the poet’s engagement with contemporary
economic debates. Gordon Campbell has rightly said that ‘Milton scholarship is a
cumulative enterprise, and any scholar who seeks to see further than his predecessors is
conscious that he must construct his vantage point on the work of others’ (1997, ix). If I
have been able to see a little further, it is because I have been standing on Hoxby’s
shoulders. Hoxby begins his economic analysis of Milton by arguing that ‘we cannot fully
understand [Areopagitica’s] model of intellectual exchange without accounting for its debt
to economic discourse’, and he sees the tract as a ‘fine example of the way pleading for an
open market … provided a model for libertarian thought’ (1998, 178). In Areopagitica,
Milton is an intellectual antimonopolist, opposed to any impediment to the ‘free and open
marketplace of ideas [which] is the best way of ensuring that the truth is enlarged and that
men are diligent and ingenious in its production’ (Hoxby 1998, 186).
Hoxby discusses Milton’s use of economic ideas more fully in Mammon’s Music:
Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002), the only book published on the
topic to date. Hoxby’s essential point is simple, but has wide-ranging implications: Milton
‘chose to apply his mastery of economic logic as often as not to problems (like intellectual
exchange or the preservation of choice in the polity) that were not on the face of it
economic’ (2002, 238). In his survey of the relationship between economic ideas and the
development of Milton’s thought, Hoxby offers a number of astute readings. I agree with
his suggestions that Areopagitica is ‘indebted to earlier defences of free trade, which
provided a model argument for the circulation of ideas,’ that in the Readie and Easie Way
Milton ‘advocated a federalist model that was informed by contemporary arrangements in
the United Provinces,’ and that in Paradise Lost Satan and the devils are represented as
12
unscrupulous merchants (Hoxby 2002, 11; 62; 157). But there is little need to devote much
space to rehearsing where Hoxby and I agree, since where we disagree is much more
important.
While Hoxby’s readings are generally sound, there are a number of points where he
tends towards oversimplification. Milton’s attitudes towards the Lady’s doctrine of
abstinence vacillate throughout his life, and Hoxby’s assessment of the poet’s beliefs
regarding abstinence at various points provide an ideal index to the trajectory of
Mammon’s Music. Hoxby is right to identify Comus as instancing Milton’s ‘first cautious
interest in the new economic reasoning of the 1620s,’ but his conclusion that ‘the
overarching logic of the masque leaves little doubt that the Lady is right to hoard’ (Hoxby
2002, 17; 24) is unconvincing. It is only in the divorce tracts, Hoxby maintains, that we
find Milton ‘no longer content with the Lady’s ideal of stoic self-mastery’ and
consequently ‘reconceiv[ing] autonomy in more social terms as the power to enter and
dissolve contracts and thus, potentially, to circulate sexually’ (2002, 58). But as I show in
Chapter 3, Milton questions the tenability of the Lady’s stoicism in Comus itself,
constructing instead a pragmatically-minded model of sexual and economic circulation.7
Hoxby claims that after expressing an ‘increasing interest’ during the 1640s in
Comus’s ideas on circulation, by the Readie and Easie Way Milton had returned ‘to the
purity of the Lady’s doctrine of abstention,’ which is evidence of a ‘deep intellectual crisis
that would have consequences for Paradise Lost’ (2002, 87). For Hoxby, ‘Paradise Lost’s
engagement with the theme of trade is largely negative’ (2002, 177), and he believes the
great epic marks the final stage of Milton’s movement back towards the Lady’s abstention.
The flourishing long-distance trade of the Restoration period renders ‘plenty rather than
scarcity … the real threat,’ and Hoxby maintains that ‘the crucial moral response will not
be the redistribution that the Lady advocated but the abstention that she practiced’ (2002,
175). Hoxby’s suggestion that after the Restoration Milton solely engages with economic
ideas in a negative way is, as I will demonstrate, problematic.
Hoxby is generally attuned to Milton’s adaptation of economic ideas to various
ends, and at the outset of Mammon’s Music he observes that
7
Interestingly, Ruth Mohl dates the three entries on polygamy in Milton’s commonplace book to between
1634 and 1637 (CPW 1:397; 400). Leo Miller dates them between 1635 and 1641, while Thomas Corns
recently dated one of the polygamy entries to the late 1630s (L. Miller 1974, 5; 6; Corns 2012, 288).
13
the religious beliefs of authors like Worsley, Robinson, and Petty, who still figure
in histories of economic thought, were neither in conflict with nor irrelevant to their
tracts on trade. Indeed, their faith may actually have helped them to conceive of
trade’s abstract operations. It is not a very long step from continuing revelation to
the elasticity of wealth, from the workings of providence to the invisible course of
trade. (2002, 6)
He continues that ‘the contiguity between various kinds of commerce – economic, cultural,
and spiritual – had long been celebrated in London’s mayoral shows,’ and even mentions a
few Puritans who ‘made the imaginative leap from economic to spiritual commerce’ and
cites examples of the profusion of economic imagery in sermons of this period (Hoxby
2002, 31–33).8 It is all the more surprising, then, to see Hoxby fail to consider this aspect
of Milton’s thought more fully, and this is one of the main oversights my thesis addresses.
Mammon’s Music has a number of deftly historicised flourishes, such as Hoxby’s
observation during his discussion of Adam’s vision from Speculation that ‘the word
speculation was just taking on its economic meanings as prospective investment: the
OED’s first recorded use in that sense is by John Evelyn in 1666’ (2002, 169). But there is
nevertheless a sense that Hoxby’s argument could be more firmly supported by references
to biographical context; while he often shows that Milton was interested in economic ideas,
he rarely suggests why this might be the case.
This shortcoming has been remedied by David Hawkes, whose 2009 biography
traces Milton’s lifelong engagement with economic ideas. In a recent article, Hawkes
pinpoints Milton senior’s usury as a formative influence on his son, and this proves to be
an astute point of reference. Milton’s connection to usury did not end with him taking on
the family business but is likely to be a major factor in his marriage to Mary Powell in
1642 (Hawkes 2011, 508). For Hawkes, usury ‘insistently insinuates itself into Milton’s
8
I discuss the prevalence of economic imagery in seventeenth-century theological tracts at length in Chapter
1. As an example of such a mayoral pageant, Hoxby cites the King’s speech in Middleton’s The Triumphes of
Truth (1613):
My queen and people all, at one time won
By the religious conversation
Of English merchants, factors, travellers,
Whose truth did with our spirits hold commerce,
As their affairs with us; following their path,
We all were brought to the true Christian faith. (Middleton 2007, p.973, ll.435–440)
14
work’ (2011, 509), and it is indeed a recognisable strand running through Milton’s corpus.9
Usury is the key to unpicking the perplexing final couplet of ‘How Soon Hath Time’
(1632), which urges a shift from evaluating human life as a tally of achievements to seeing
it as a qualitative essence, and ‘the means to that end is a revised and corrected
understanding of usury’ (Hawkes 2011, 521). Hawkes’s analysis comes alive in his
discussion of Salmasius, whom he identifies as being famed across Europe for his
publication of a number of eloquent defences of usury, De usuria (1638), De modo
usurarum (1639), and Foenore trapezitico (1640) (2011, 508–509). It is true that
Salmasius convincingly demonstrated that money was a commodity ‘which could be
rented and traded just like any other thing,’ but Hawkes’s assertion that this was an
‘epochal breakthrough’ should be qualified with the observation that it was perhaps only
the first such observation to be published.10 Hawkes notes that although there is no proof
that Milton read Salmasius on usury, a ‘resounding vindication of his family business by
one of the most famous Protestant scholars in Europe cannot have escaped his attention’
(2011, 513).11
Hawkes’s reading of usury in Paradise Lost is particularly effective, in which he
follows Claire Colebrook (2008, 58) in finding Satan espousing the erroneously
quantitative view of life present in ‘How Soon Hath Time’ (Hawkes 2011, 517). Satan
vainly hopes that rebellion would free him from the debt he owes God (PL 4.51-57), which
he thinks can never be paid since gratitude is like ‘compound interest, a never-ending,
always increasing burden exacted on a regular temporal basis’ (Hawkes 2011, 517). He
fails to realise that his ‘status as a debtor is not temporary or temporal, but inherent in his
essential nature,’ and that the only way this debt can be paid is through changing his
understanding of his essence by acknowledging that his ‘very existence is a loan from
God’ (Hawkes 2011, 517). But far from God being ‘a cruel and unjust usurer’ (Hawkes
2011, 517), as Satan maintains, the Son praises ‘the Father for His genuinely productive
9
David Urban fruitfully reads Milton’s enduring fascination with the parables of the labourers (Matt. 20:116) and of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30) in relation to usury. Milton exhibits an enduring anxiety that both his
father and his Father will consider him to have squandered their gifts. Instead, he wishes to be seen as ‘a wise
investment’ (Urban 2004, 9).
10
As we shall see in Chapter 1, Thomas Mun recognised that money was essentially a commodity in
England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade, written in the late 1620s but not published until 1664.
11
This is borne out by the fact that Milton is curiously silent in the First Defence on Salmasius’s ideas about
usury, and Milton’s longest discussion of usury, in the Christian Doctrine, ‘follows [Salmasius’s] reasoning
closely’ (Hawkes 2011, 513).
15
usury, which uses even Satan’s own activities for creative ends: “his evil / Thou usest, and
from thence creat’st more good” (Hawkes 2011, 517; 518, quoting PL 7.615–16).12
Hoxby makes general observations about potential connections between economic
ideas and Milton’s theology, and Hawkes’s readings of usury in Paradise Lost show that
these links both exist and are worth pursuing. But there is much more to be said, since
economic ideas lie at the very heart of Milton’s understanding of salvation. Throughout his
life, Milton ‘resolutely defended the forensic theory of the atonement,’ which
understands the atonement as a legal transaction, which was typically described as
a compact or the discharging of a debt. In this doctrine, … God the Father is the
judge and Jesus is the advocate of fallen humankind who decides to bear the
penalty on behalf of his client, so satisfying the requirement of an angry God for
satisfaction and the necessity that humankind be punished for sin. (Campbell et al.
2007a, 112–113)
A range of supporting evidence for Campbell’s reading will be adduced throughout this
thesis, but a representative example is the Son’s recognition in Paradise Regained that ‘Ere
I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, / Or work Redemption for mankind, whose sins’ / Full
weight must be transferr’d upon my head’ (PR 1.265-267).
To see how Milton got to this economic understanding of the atonement, we must
return to the beginning. The Geneva Bible’s argument for the Book of Genesis describes
‘man being placed in this great tabernacle of the worlde to behold Gods wonderful works,
and to praise his Name for the infinite graces, wherewith he had endued him.’ These are
the conditions of man’s contract with God. The greatest of these ‘infinite graces’ given by
God to man is free will, without which ‘he had bin … a meer artificiall Adam’ (CPW
2:527). To use the analogy so often on Milton’s mind, free will was the talent given to
Adam by his master, not to be buried in the ground like cloistered virtue, but to be used,
and used in the right way. God therefore ‘set before [man] a provoking object, ever almost
in his eyes; herein consisted his merit’ (CPW 2:527). If man could use his free will to resist
temptation, remain faithful and thereby praise God, God’s investment would be recouped
with interest as man’s talent was multiplied, rendering unto ‘God more glory’ (PL 12.476).
12
Just as Satan creates a distorted image of God, Scott Cohen offers an economic reading of Eikonoklastes in
terms of counterfeiting. For Cohen, Milton argues that ‘in creating his own image, an image that fails to
correspond to the image shaped under the authority of the people, Charles has counterfeited kingship itself’
(2010, 168).
16
As Milton repeatedly reminds us, there was nothing inevitable about the Fall; man was
‘sufficient to have stood’ (PL 3.99), like Abdiel, who ‘shows that it can be done; obedience
can be achieved, even under severe temptation’ (Danielson 1982, 118).
So how did it happen? Essentially, the Fall was a bad investment of the capital (free
will) given to man by God. As we have seen, Forman maintains that the Fall cannot be
considered an investment since there is no expectation of profit, and the event has not been
repeated before. This is indeed true of the biblical version, but not of Paradise Lost. The
serpent convinces Eve that in eating from the Tree he not only gained immense knowledge,
but escaped death (PL 9.679-688). Hawkes has noted Satan’s use of usurious imagery in
the temptation scene (2011, 518; PL 9.718-722), and Eve wonders ‘if Death / Bind us with
after-bands, what profits / Then our inward freedom?’ (PL 9.760-762). But her fears that
death will rob her of the ‘profits’ of her ‘inward freedom’ are allayed when she remembers
that ‘the serpent … hath eat’n and lives, / And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and
discerns, / Irrational till then’ (PL 9.764-766). The serpent has evidently gained
considerably from eating the fruit, and Eve wishes to attain a similar profit. But she soon
discovers that she has invested her free will unwisely, and is left, appropriately enough,
with nothing but snake oil.
But it is not a total loss. With man mired in sin, he is in danger of defaulting on his
debt to God, until Jesus steps in to offer him a spiritual bailout. According to Milton’s
forensic theory of the atonement, Jesus repays man’s debt to God with his own blood. This
does not, however, merely return man to where he was before the Fall. In the Christian
Doctrine, Milton defines ‘MAN’S RESTORATION’ as ‘the act by which man, freed from
sin and death by God the Father through Jesus Christ, is raised to a far more excellent state
of grace and glory than that from which he fell’ (CPW 6:415).13 Jesus’ intercession leaves
man better off than he was before the Fall, but we must be careful not to take this as
evidence of Milton’s belief in the felix culpa.
The most commonly quoted evidence for Milton’s belief in the felix culpa is
Adam’s speech after his vision of history:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
13
John Carey’s translation in the CPW is corroborated by the recent translation by John K. Hale and J.
Donald Cullington in the newly published Complete Works: ‘Man’s restoration is the act by which, set free
from sin and death by God the father through Jesus Christ, [man] rose to a far more excellent state of grace
and glory than that from which he had fallen’ (Milton 2012, 8:469).
17
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Then that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasiond, or rejoyce
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,
To God more glory, more good will to Men
From God, and over wrauth grace shall abound. (PL 12.469-478)
Jason Mahn reminds us that ‘Milton, despite how often he is cited as an exponent of the
fortunate fall, here merely considers its possibility’ (2011, 49), and Milton implies an
answer in his allusion to Paul: ‘where sinne abounded, grace did much more abound’
(Rom. 5:20). Paul’s rhetorical question, ‘shall wee continue in sinne: that grace may
abound?’ (Rom. 6:1), neatly encapsulates Adam’s quandary. Milton’s readers would have
been familiar with the following verse, and thereby answered for themselves Adam’s
questions about the felix culpa: ‘God forbid: how shall wee that are dead to sinne, live any
longer therein?’ (Rom. 6:2). A desire to persist in sin is incompatible with salvation, and
Adam’s uncertain reaction to the Fall is symptomatic of his spiritual immaturity. He now
doubts whether he should repent at all, apparently forgetting that the Son only interceded
and created ‘goodness infinite’ because Adam and Eve repented at the start of Book 11
(Ainsworth 2008, 136).14
For Arthur Lovejoy, ‘the two conclusions between which Adam is represented as
hesitating were equally inevitable; yet they were mutually repugnant. The Fall could never
be sufficiently condemned and lamented; and likewise, when all its consequences were
considered, it could never be sufficiently rejoiced over’ (1937, 162). But Lovejoy in fact
sets up a false dichotomy here, as contrition and adoration over the Fall are not ‘two
mutually exclusive propositions, but rather ‘two counterpoised dispositions working in
concert: contrition that arouses adoration and adoration that goads contrition’ (Mahn 2011,
14
For Ainsworth, Adam sounds here ‘a bit too much like Satan as the serpent, declaring to Eve that great
good may come out of her eating the fruit’ (2008, 136). This is an appropriate parallel to draw, since the only
explicit felix culpa in Paradise Lost, as Neil Forsyth notes (2003, 327), is expressed by Satan when he
encourages his troops:
From this descent
Celestial vertues rising, will appear
More glorious and more dread then from no fall. (PL 2.14-16)
18
49). Mahn sees these counterpoised dispositions at work when Michael’s foretelling the
incarnation leaves ‘Adam with such joy / Surcharg’d, as he like grief bin dewed in tears’
(PL 12.372-74). This is no mere ‘rhetorical flourish. It expresses the lack of any one point
of view from which the Fall can be contemplated or univocal discourse in which its
meaning can be stated’ (Mahn 2011, 49–50).
Despite his misreadings, Lovejoy is nonetheless correct to observe that ‘the final
state of the redeemed’ surpasses ‘the pristine happiness and innocence of the first pair in
Eden’ (1937, 162). However, his conclusion that ‘but for the Fall, man would presumably
have [indefinitely] remained’ (1937, 162) in such a state is ‘simply invalid’ (Danielson
1982, 211). Milton actually ‘takes great pains to suggest what would have happened had
man never fallen; and … it involved a meaningful struggle to be perfectly obedient to the
will of God, and it progressed toward a magnificent goal’ (Mollenkott 1972, 1).15 Raphael
tells Adam:
One Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav’d from good, …
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit,
Improv’d by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav’nly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progenie you are. (PL 5.469-71; 497-503)
Milton evidently did not believe unfallen man to be static, and the rewards of obedience
are profound. But the question remains whether they outweigh the benefits of
redemption.16 A. D Nuttall argues for a ‘naturalist felix culpa,’ whereby ‘the Fall does not
15
In addition to the works cited here, further refutations of Milton’s supposed belief in the felix culpa can be
found in John C. Ulreich, “A Paradise Within: The Fortunate Fall in Paradise Lost,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971): 351–366, and Diana Benet, “Satan, God’s Glory and the Fortunate Fall,” Milton
Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1985): 34–37.
16
While conceding that Milton did not subscribe to the felix culpa, Victor Haines’s discussion of the doctrine
enumerates these benefits thus: ‘the joys of hopeful penance and patient suffering remembered in the history
of personal sin from which the redeemed have been extricated, confession of personal guilt in the knowledge
of good and evil, the bliss of a new communion with a loving, forgiving God, reconciliation, acceptance of
forgiveness, thanksgiving for conquered sin, and resurrection from penal death are all benefits of the new
19
lead, through a long sequence, to ultimate good; rather, it is good immediately. Adam and
Eve as they fall are instantly promoted, by authentic moral knowledge, to an arena of
strenuous virtue’ (1998, 120). For Nuttall, the postlapsarian state is superior to the
prelapsarian due to the ethical opportunities it presents: ‘the higher state half-promised by
the angel would never be the dramatic, darkened field of moral heroism which this world
affords’ (1998, 120). This is an attractive reading – and Milton indeed subscribes to it in
Areopagitica – but it is not tenable in Paradise Lost. Areopagitica claims that ‘the
knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill’ (CPW
2:514), but in Paradise Lost God is emphatic:
Let [man] boast
His knowledge of Good lost, and Evil got,
Happier, had suffic’d him to have known
Good by it self, and Evil not at all. (PL 11.86-89)
Nor is the Fall a prerequisite for learning about evil. There are no shortage of opportunities
to do so in Eden: Raphael warns Adam and Eve about evil through his account of the war
in Heaven, Eve’s dream gives them the opportunity to learn about evil and how to
overcome it, and they both experience the possibilities of evil internally (Danielson 1982,
197).
It is clear, then, that Milton came to believe that the Fall was positive from one
angle and negative from another. It ultimately left man with more than he had, but not
more than he could have had. Intermediary loss was still turned to ultimate profit, and in
this Milton reflects the nascent economic theories of his time, which asserted that capital
could only be accumulated through investment.17 Milton maintained this economic mindset
throughout his career, always viewing hoarding as a missed opportunity for investment and
profit.
It was also common in this period for a borrower to specify another wealthier
individual (usually a family member or friend) to stand surety, whereby the guarantor
agreed to assume responsibility for the debt of the borrower if the repayments could not be
creation that could never have been benefits in the perfection of Eden. Whatever other gifts the innocent
Adam could have been given, he could not have been given these’ (2000, 87).
17
In contrast with bullionists, who maintained that true wealth was to be achieved by minimising imports and
maximising the national stockpile of gold, Misselden and Mun emphasised that bullion sent to the East Indies
was not really lost, but returned as commodities which were then re-exported or sold for considerable profit. I
explore these economic ideas more fully in Chapter 1.
20
made.18 As a lifelong usurer Milton would of course have been familiar with such
practices, but Edward Jones is right to note that ‘how this world [of usury] and its activities
found expression in Milton’s writing has only just begun to be explored and assessed’
(2013, 7). For Kerry MacLennan, ‘Milton’s fluency in the commercial lexicon, with an
accent on fastidious bookkeeping and the grammar of debt, informs and animates his
creative work’ (2010, 222) and my thesis takes as its starting point the two-handed engine
of investment for profit and payments of surety, tracing their influence on the development
of Milton’s understanding of salvation.
The roots of this economic soteriology are found in the economic and theological
treatises of the 1620s and early 1630s, which I examine in Chapter 1. Hoxby gives a rather
cursory treatment of economic thought in the 1620s, and his analysis is less secure for it.
The first section of Chapter 1 will therefore provide the historical context of early Stuart
economic policy, before discussing the economic thought of Edward Misselden and
Thomas Mun. The second section will expand Hoxby’s brief mention of English
theologians by tracing the development of English covenant theology through the works of
William Ames, John Preston, and Thomas Hooker, demonstrating these thinkers’
increasing tendency to understand salvation in economic terms.
While the economic and theological debates of the 1620s and early 1630s
influenced Milton’s later soteriological thought, the issues they raised were also explored
by other contemporary writers whom I discuss in Chapter 2. The connections between
economic and theological contexts and the literary output of Milton’s predecessors have
been overlooked by both Hoxby and Hawkes, and I will address this oversight. In the
1620s, stricter enforcement of trade monopolies and a reformulation of the usury laws were
proposed to lift the trade depression, and Ben Jonson satirised these ideas in The Staple of
Newes (1626). In The Temple (1633), we see the influence of the covenant theologians who
were George Herbert’s Cambridge contemporaries, and his poetry gradually unfolds a
conception of salvation as transaction which is a clear precedent for Milton’s economic
soteriology.
Chapter 3 argues that Milton’s early works can be read as meditations on
contemporary developments in economic thought, seen through the prism of hoarding and
consumption. Economic ideas frame the debate regarding sexual hoarding which is the
18
For a recent account of debt relations in this period, see Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and
Personhood in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
21
centrepiece of Comus (1634), and I argue that Milton’s response to the tenability of
hoarding is more complex than Hoxby suggests. Mammon’s Music also makes no mention
of the History of Moscovia (early 1640s), which is surprising since it is Milton’s first
explicit and extended interrogation of different attitudes to trade. The Moscovia, I argue,
considers the consequences of a national adoption of the Lady’s compulsion to hoard. Of
Reformation (1641), again referenced only in passing by Hoxby and Hawkes, draws
together the strands of hoarding and consumption in depicting a clergy who are,
paradoxically, simultaneously consumers and misers. In rejecting the excesses of the
clergy, Milton constructs a model of economic consumption which is neither ascetic nor
libertine.
Winstanley attacks immoderate economic appetites in Fire in the Bush (1650),
which criticises the greed of those who seek to amass private property and exclude their
fellow men from enjoying a fair share of the earth. For Winstanley, the Garden of Eden
was not a historical place but the soul of every man, and the Fall was an economic attitude.
It was a submission to covetousness which manifested itself in both the jealous
maintenance of private property and working for hire. Milton exhibits a similar distaste for
hire in the First Defence of the English People (1651), which depicts Salmasius as a
grasping mercenary. Milton treats hirelings at greater length in Considerations Touching
the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), which develops a more nuanced response
to the issue of hire than Winstanley’s blanket prohibition. Milton proposes that the clergy
support themselves by learning a trade, reflecting the easy congruence of economic and
spiritual matters in his mind. Having addressed the covetousness of the clergy, in the
Readie and Easie Way Milton turns his attention to the avarice of the English. With the
Restoration looming, Milton frantically sketched a viable republican political settlement.
Yet for all his protestations of the assured prosperity of his new commonwealth, he seems
all too aware that his countrymen will find their appetites better sated under a monarchy.
While Hoxby and Hawkes argue that Milton’s post-Restoration works only
represent economic ideas in a negative sense, Chapter 5 will demonstrate that the Christian
Doctrine and Paradise Lost are reliant on economic imagery to construct their soteriology.
In the Christian Doctrine Milton draws on economics in a similar way to earlier covenant
theologians, but it is in Paradise Lost that we find the most eloquent account of his
economic soteriology. The negative economic associations of the poem – such as
imperialism in the New World and Satan being characterised as a spice trader – have been
22
amply discussed by Hoxby and his predecessors, so I need not retread their ground. To
create a more nuanced reading, I will instead consider how Milton represents economic
ideas both positively and negatively in his great epic. The latter will be treated in my
analysis of the devils’ mining and metallurgy in Book 1, where Milton’s debt to
Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia (1540) has previously gone unnoticed by scholars. But for
all the satanic associations of gold and trade in the poem, the language of economics is not
exclusively negative in Paradise Lost. Milton repeatedly conceptualises sin and salvation
in terms of debt, repayment, and profit, and economic ideas are fundamental to the poem’s
soteriological message. Paradise Lost represents both the Fall and the atonement as
economic exchanges, with Eve being convinced by Satan to invest her capital, free will, in
consumption of the Tree of Knowledge. The immense profit promised fails to materialise
and her capital looks to have been squandered. But Jesus, acting like the guarantor so
familiar from Milton’s family trade, steps in and pays off man’s debt to God, producing
considerable profit for both parties.
This idea of salvation through external intervention is further developed in another
text overlooked by both Hoxby and Hawkes, the History of Britain (1670). The ancient
Britons are uncivilised and barbaric, and Chapter 6 demonstrates how the successive
invasions by Romans, Saxons, and Danes, while initially devastating, are shown in time to
be the means by which new ideas and practices are introduced to Britain. Echoing various
contemporary economic tracts which argued that foreign immigration would improve the
economic situation of the English, the History demonstrates the importance of foreign
influence. Milton maintains that a free trade in ideas is the sole means by which the
country can escape its barbaric primitive state and move from sin to salvation.
23
Chapter 1
‘The husbandman in the seed-time … casteth away much good corn into the ground’:
Early Seventeenth-Century Economic and Theological Thought
Mirabell: I wonder there is not an Act of Parliament to save the Credit of the
Nation, and prohibit the Exportation of Fools.
Fainall: By no means, ’tis better as ’tis; ’tis better to Trade with a little Loss, than to
be quite eaten up, with being overstock’d.
– Congreve, The Way of the World (1.1.201-206)
In placing economic and theological thinkers alongside each other, there is a ‘danger of
arguing by analogy, as if homologies indicate shared causalities, or arbitrary specimens of
a cultural field were synecdoches of the whole’ (Barbour 2000, 197), but Derrida reminds
us that ‘the economic and the semio-linguistic sciences are no more juxtaposed than
subordinated to each other. Their overlapping and cross-checking within a general theory
of need and overabundance draws a more complex figure’ (1987, 102). This ‘complex
figure’ has attracted increasing attention recently, with a number of essays emphasising the
congruence between economics and theology in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.19
Valerie Forman’s reading of Elizabethan and early Jacobean tragicomedy ‘through the lens
of economic theory’ has revealed how ‘merchants, economic theorists, and tragicomic
playwrights all resolve the problem of present loss by reconceptualising it as a
transformable source of legitimate, future profit,’ and that the common root of this new
understanding was the felix culpa (2008, 1; 14; 7). But while Forman discusses Misselden
and Mun alongside literary texts published up to the end of the 1620s, there is not a single
mention of the covenant theology which was flourishing in England in this period.20 This is
a serious oversight, since nowhere is the overlap between economic and theological
19
Odd Langholm (2009) and John Singleton (2011) have attempted to restore Luther to his proper place in
the history of economic thought, while Peter Harrison has demonstrated that in the early modern period the
phrase ‘invisible hand’ most commonly referred to the Calvinist conception of providence, and so ‘when
[Adam] Smith’s first readers encountered the phrase in his writings they would naturally have read it in a
way that was in keeping with the predominant usage’ (2011, 45).
20
Forman’s discussion ranges over Shakespeare, Fletcher, Webster, and Massinger, so we see Milton joining
an established tradition of literary writers who drew on the interplay between economic and theological
thought. These spheres would also overlap potently in Gerrard Winstanley’s writing, discussed below in
Chapter 4.
24
concepts more apparent than in covenant theology, which patterned itself on the economic
exigencies of everyday life, constructing God as a landlord, Jesus as a guarantor, and
postlapsarian man as a debtor who must keep up payments on his spiritual rent. The
blurring of the boundaries between economics and theology in the 1620s and 1630s is not
only evident in their shared vocabulary of contract, investment, profit, and loss, but in the
way the ‘mental universe’ of Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun was ‘dominated … by
the very same organicism that defined the world of Johannes Kepler, Richard Hooker, or
William Perkins’ (Finkelstein 2000a, 25).21 In order to provide a firm basis for the later
discussion of the influence of contemporary economic debates on Milton’s soteriology, this
chapter will outline the main developments in economic and theological thought in the
early seventeenth century. The first section will provide the historical context of early
Stuart economic policy, before discussing the economic thought of Edward Misselden and
Thomas Mun.22 The second section will trace the development of English covenant
theology through the works of William Ames, John Preston, and Thomas Hooker,
demonstrating these thinkers’ increasing tendency to understand salvation in economic
terms.23
In 1603, James I acceded to the throne of a nation £400,000 in debt (Russell 2011,
158). Despite this deficit, exports of England’s primary product, white broadcloth, grew
constantly during the first decade of his reign and reached their ‘highest ever level in 1614’
(Suprinyak 2011a, 465). While exports of broadcloth provided a steady national income,
‘most of the profit on cloth was from the finishing and dyeing process,’ and ‘since most
21
While ‘organicism’ (at least in the field of literary criticism) carries Romantic connotations, it here refers
to the fact that ‘the people of the early seventeenth century had no conception of a distinct “economic”
dimension of life, and if we are to understand their thinking we must suspend our artificial and reified notion
that the “economy” is an identifiable “sphere” or “thing”’ (Hawkes 2003, 79). The works of the covenant
theologian William Perkins sat alongside Hakluyt’s Voyages in the standard reading matter supplied by the
East India Company to its ships (Wright 1943, 71), and Joyce Appleby suggests that the proliferation of
economic literature of the early 1620s ‘owes its existence, in all probability, to the outpouring of writings on
religion and politics’ (1978, 4).
22
This section is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of early seventeenth-century economic thought; I
will only discuss those writers whose works were well-known enough to be familiar to those, like Milton,
who moved in learned circles. I therefore focus only on the most prominent economic thinkers of the period,
Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, and pass over minor figures such as Thomas Milles, Dudley Digges,
and Rice Vaughan. Gerard de Malynes, although writing in the 1620s, sits uneasily alongside Misselden and
Mun because he was ‘a man living well beyond his time, for he took his sixteenth-century ideas, pristine and
uncompromised, into the controversial arena’ (Supple 1959, 211). I do not discuss Malynes at length because
his atavistic economic ideology has little relevance to a thesis discussing Milton’s use of nascent
contemporary economic thought.
23
This thesis examines the influence of economics on Milton’s theology and not the influence of theology on
Milton’s economics, and I place the same emphasis in this chapter. My argument is that English covenant
theology is suffused with economic language and ideas, not that English economic writers were influenced
by covenant theologians. I have found no evidence of Mun’s religious affiliations or sympathies, and
Misselden was certainly no friend of radical covenant theologians like Thomas Hooker, as I discuss below.
25
English cloth was exported unfinished … the Dutch finishing manufacturers took the
cream of the profits’ (Coward 2011, 15). In 1614, William Cockayne, an advisor to James I
who had become ‘enormously wealthy’ by ‘export[ing] cloth to the Baltic on a
considerable scale’ saw the opportunity to carry out ‘what he considered to be the great
project of his life: the dyeing and dressing of all cloths made in England before their
exportation’ (Aldous 2009). Cockayne proposed that
the export of unfinished cloth should be banned, that the monopoly of the Merchant
Adventurers be rescinded, and that he and his syndicate should establish a new
company to take over the profitable dyeing process and control the export of the
cloth. The crown, through increased customs duties, would gain from the enhanced
value of the trade, and Cockayne also offered James a substantial cash payment.
(Coward 2011, 15)24
While this was a risky proposition ‘at a time when cloth constituted 80 percent of English
exports’ (Selwood 2010, 38), the king accepted Cockayne’s plan, revoked the Merchant
Adventurers’ monopoly, and established the New Merchant Adventurers Company in its
place. However,
the entire scheme began to collapse even as it was officially put into place. Most of
the prominent members of the old Merchant Adventurers declined to be part of the
new guild. Further, James did not predict that the Dutch, who made much of their
profits in the dyeing and dressing of wool, would be so angered by this affront to
their industry that they would immediately ban the import of all English cloth.
(Hentschell 2008, 161)
Either of these problems in isolation could have been overcome, but with the Dutch market
gone and the new company lacking ‘the Merchant Adventurers’ marketing contacts in
Europe’ (Coward 2011, 15), it was difficult to find replacement buyers. This situation was
exacerbated by English craftsmen not possessing ‘sufficient skill in the art of dyeing cloth’
24
In addition to the works cited in this section, older but still useful accounts of the Cockayne Plan can be
found in B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642: A Study in the Instability of a
Mercantile Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), R. W. K. Hinton, The Eastland Trade
and the Common Weal in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), and
Astrid Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade: The Commercial Policy of England in its
Main Aspects, 1603-1625 (London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1927).
26
(Coward 2011, 15), leaving most Europeans unimpressed by the inferior quality of English
finished cloth. Consequently, there was ‘a dramatic falling off in the export of cloth’
(Benson 2002, 48) and the ‘substantial increase in profits, customs, and employment’
(Cramsie 2002, 132) promised by Cockayne failed to materialise.25 In 1617 the New
Merchant Adventurers Company was dissolved and the former company’s charter was
regranted in exchange for ‘a lump-sum payment of £80,000’ and the usual ‘gifts and bribes
to courtiers’ (Brenner 2003, 211). The failed project ‘fundamentally altered England’s
cloth trade and its commercial relations with the continent. English exports of unfinished
shortcloths would never again reach their pre-project levels’ (Benson 2002, 79–80), and
even in 1640 ‘the value of exports was less than it had been before 1615’ (Muldrew 2012,
512).
By 1618 ‘the Crown’s debt had reached £900,000’ (Brenner 2003, 200), and
England’s already shaky financial situation was exacerbated by economic preparations on
the continent for the Thirty Years War. Events in the Holy Roman Empire are
representative:
in order to raise the armies necessary for the war, governments needed to raise
large sums of money to pay mercenaries … [but] a unified tax code was impossible
in the ‘crazy quilt’ of territories which formed the empire, each with its own
partisan interests. The easiest solution for those in power was to strike more
debased coins. The effect of debasing within one’s own borders could be further
enhanced by going outside the territory, exchanging the debased coins for good
coins, and then returning these for further debasement. (Paas 2012, 12)
The debased coins spread throughout Europe due to both the intentional circulation
described above and the operation of Gresham’s Law.26 Having coins of the same nominal
but different intrinsic value circulating together was problematic enough, but this was
exacerbated because the inevitable consequence of a currency debasement was an inflation
of that currency (Munro 2008, 41). It therefore became increasingly difficult to accurately
25
Between 25 December 1614 and 25 March 1615, the number of cloths exported from London ‘declined by
17,211 from the first quarter of the previous year. This decline was almost entirely in the trade of unfinished
cloth and accounted for a loss of £6000 in customs duties for the Crown’(Benson 2002, 48).
26
Gresham’s Law is named for financier Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), although the idea was articulated in
the mid-fourteenth century by the French philosopher, Nicole Oresme. The principle is that ‘bad money
drives out good money’: following a currency debasement, ‘so long as coins circulated only by tale (facevalue), no rational, informed person would spend higher-silver content coins of the same face value. Instead,
most merchants would melt down and hoard the better coins as bullion, or sell them for export to foreign
mints, especially those engaged in debasements’ (Munro 2012, 16).
27
determine international exchange rates, which further problematised trade between
European countries.
The domestic and international economic challenges faced by England in the early
1620s prompted an outpouring of debate regarding both causes and solutions. But before
delving into the economic tracts themselves, it will be useful to begin by considering the
ideology they putatively propound: mercantilism.27 The economic writers commonly
considered mercantilists never described themselves as such, and indeed the term
mercantilism itself was ‘coined by its opponents’ (de Deugd and Hoen 2010, 20). It is
rooted in Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau’s use of the term systém mercantile in his
Philosophie Rurale (1763) to describe the ‘economic policy regime characterized by direct
state intervention, intended to protect domestic merchants and manufacturers’ which
prevailed in France in the later seventeenth century and was ‘designed primarily to finance
state manufactories’ (Magnusson 2003, 46).
Mercantilism was more fully theorised in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and this work came to define the
characteristics of mercantilism for later commentators. The Wealth of Nations critiques at
length the ‘commercial, or mercantile system’ (A. Smith 1976, 429), and identifies the
fundamental error of this system as the belief that ‘wealth consists in money, or in gold and
silver’ (1976, 429). Smith denies that wealth can be increased simply by stockpiling
bullion: we would not attempt to
increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an
unnecessary number of kitchen utensils … [because] it would be absurd to have
more pots and pans than were necessary for cooking the victuals usually consumed
… [and] if the quantity of victuals were to increase, the number of pots and pans
would readily increase along with it, a part of the increased quantity of victuals
being employed in purchasing them, or in maintaining an additional number of
workmen whose business it was to make them. (1976, 439–440)
27
Mercantilism commonly attracts scant attention in histories of economic thought, often a mere paragraph in
sections discussing Adam Smith. A recent exception to this is Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, and John B.
Davis (eds.), A Companion to the History of Economic Thought (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003),
which includes an excellent essay on the topic by Lars Magnusson (pp.46-60). Magnusson’s Mercantilism:
The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994) is also an invaluable survey of the
evolution of the concept. Andrea Finkelstein’s Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of
Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000) offers
an illuminating discussion of Misselden and Mun, although she questions the validity of the term
‘mercantilism’.
28
Smith is not part of ‘the croud … set agape’ by ‘Grooms besmeard with Gold’ (PL 5.3556), as he rejects the mercantile system’s fetishisation of precious metals, arguing that gold
and silver are subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other commodity.
They are mere
utensils … as much as the furniture of the kitchen. Increase the use for them,
increase the consumable commodities which are to be circulated, managed, and
prepared by means of them, and you will infallibly increase the quantity; but if you
attempt, by extraordinary means, to increase the quantity, you will infallibly
diminish the use and even the quantity too, which in those metals can never be
greater than what the use requires. Were they ever to be accumulated beyond this
quantity, their transportation is so easy, and the loss which attends their lying idle
and unemployed so great, that no law could prevent their being immediately sent
out of the country. (1976, 440)28
The mercantile system’s preoccupation with gold and silver ‘leads to an obsession with the
balance of trade’ (Rothschild and Sen 2006, 340), and so ‘the encouragement of
exportation, and the discouragement of importation are the two great engines by which the
mercantile system proposes to enrich every country’ (A. Smith 1976, 642). In the
mercantile system, an export surplus ‘earned gold and silver’ (Kennedy 2010, 129) because
‘when the country exported to a greater value than it imported, a balance became due to it
from foreign nations, which was necessarily paid to it in gold and silver’ (A. Smith 1976,
432). But Smith believed there was nothing ‘more absurd than this whole doctrine of the
balance of trade’ (1976, 488), both in theory and in practice.
In the sixteenth century ‘various nations entered into … a commercial struggle,
which was fought out in wars, protective duties and prohibitions … trade had from now on
a political significance’ (Marx and Engels 1998, 5:69), and this ‘conjunction between
politics and the economy … turned the globe into a theatre of perpetual commercial war’
(Hont 2010, 6). International trade was conceptualised as a zero-sum game in which each
nation ‘look[ed] with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it
28
The young Marx made a similar observation in Comments on James Mill’s Élémens d’économie politique
(1844): ‘the crude economic superstition of the people and governments clings to the sensuous, tangible,
conspicuous money-bag, and therefore believes both in the absolute value of the precious metals and
possession of them as the sole reality of wealth … then the enlightened, worldly-wise economist comes
forward and proves to them that money is a commodity like any other, the value of which, like that of any
other commodity, depends therefore on the relation of the cost of production to demand, competition, and
supply, to the quantity or competition of the other commodities’ (Marx and Engels 1998, 3:213).
29
trade[d], and … consider[ed] their gain as its own loss’ (A. Smith 1976, 493), and the
theoretical premise of the balance of trade was that ‘if the balance be even, neither of [the
trading partners] either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of
them loses, and the other gains in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium’
(A. Smith 1976, 489). Smith used the example of two nations trading their native
commodities to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the zero-sum model. If the commodities
traded were of equal financial value, this would be an equally balanced trade in the zerosum model, with no benefit or loss to either nation. But this was untrue, as
if the balance be even, and if the trade between the two places consist altogether in
the exchange of their native commodities, they will, upon most occasions, not only
both gain, but they will gain equally, or very near equally; each will in this case
afford a market for a part of the surplus produce of the other: each will replace a
capital which had been employed in raising and preparing for the market this part
of the surplus produce of the other, and which had been distributed among, and
given revenue and maintenance to a certain number of its inhabitants. Some part of
the inhabitants of each, therefore, will indirectly derive their revenue and
maintenance from the other. (A. Smith 1976, 489)
The theoretical issues underlying the balance of trade model were compounded by more
pragmatic problems. The balance of trade was determined by tallying the records of
imports and exports in the customhouse books, which presented its own difficulties: ‘heavy
duties being imposed upon almost all goods imported, our merchant importers smuggle as
much, and make entry of as little as they can. Our merchant exporters, on the contrary,
make entry of more than they export; sometimes out of vanity, and to pass for great dealers
in goods which pay no duty; and sometimes to gain a bounty or a drawback’ (A. Smith
1976, 883). The customhouse books therefore appear to show exports which greatly
overbalance imports, ‘to the unspeakable comfort of those politicians who measure the
national prosperity by what they call the balance of trade’ (A. Smith 1976, 883), despite
the true figures being quite different.
Smith’s definition of the mercantile system became the standard for the following
two centuries, and even into the first half of the twentieth century, the concept of
mercantilism, as it was now known, was ‘indispensable and relatively unproblematic’
(Ormrod 2003, 3). The most notable of this generation of economic historians was Eli
30
Heckscher, whose Mercantilism (1931) was an ‘all-encompassing attempt to come up with
a definitive portrait of mercantilist doctrines and policies’ (Suprinyak 2011a, 462) and
accordingly defined mercantilism as both ‘a uniform body of doctrine’ and ‘a phase in the
history of economic policy’ (Heckscher 1955, 27; 19). For Heckscher, mercantilism itself
was a ‘unified, coherent system,’ and economic policy should not be viewed as ‘the
outcome and result of the actual economic situation’ (1955, 21; 20), two assertions which
proved highly contentious.
In an article first published in 1939, A. V. Judges questioned the theoretical unity
of mercantilism, reminding us that for ‘an “ism” to be worthy of serious consideration [it]
must offer a coherent doctrine, or at least a handful of settled principles’ (1969, 35). No
such coherent principles are found in seventeenth-century economic thought, and Judges
concluded that ‘mercantilism never had a creed; nor was there a priesthood dedicated to its
service’ (1969, 35) and so the ‘altar’ of mercantilism supposedly uncovered by Smith and
Heckscher was nothing more than an ‘archaeological reconstruction … first erected by
men who fortified their attachments to their own faith by abusing the discredited and
superstitious antics of their ancestors’ (1969, 36).29 D. C. Coleman’s 1957 article ‘Eli
Heckscher and the Idea of Mercantilism’ took issue with Heckscher’s separation of
economic policy from its historical context, arguing that ‘because of his reluctance to
concede that the ideas and policies of the time might owe something to contemporary
awareness of economic reality, however crude or empirical, Heckscher did not bring out at
all clearly certain fundamental distinctions both in ideas and in circumstances in the socalled “mercantilist” period’ (1969, 109). For Coleman, Heckscher’s use of the term
‘mercantilism’ was more than a mere reductive misnomer, but actually obstructed the
historiographical process, as it ‘serve[d] to give a false unity to disparate events, to conceal
the close-up reality of particular times and particular circumstances, to blot out the vital
intermixture of ideas and preconceptions, of interests and influences, political and
economic, and of the personalities of men, which it is the historian’s job to examine’(1969,
117).
While Coleman conceded that ‘as a description of a trend of economic thought, the
term [mercantilism] may well be useful, and worth retaining’ (1969, 117), recent economic
historians tend to use the term only with qualifications and caveats: ‘I understand
mercantilism not as a science of economic thought but as a contested label for various
29
B. E. Supple concurred that it was unwise to use the term mercantilism when discussing seventeenthcentury government policy, ‘for this would be tacitly to assume a full-blown system of doctrine and policy
which we may feel did not exist, and would imply a continuity and momentum in official outlook which have
been more conspicuous in history books than history’ (1959, 229).
31
forms of economic policy. That is, theory followed experience. In short, there was no one
universal mercantilism but rather many, depending on time, place, and interests’ (Koot
2007, 133 n.3).
It is now recognised that mercantilism did not exist in the seventeenth century as an
overarching ideal which systematically shaped government policy, but ‘originated with
Adam Smith’ (Sandmo 2011, 18) a century later. Seventeenth-century economic policy
was determined by the capricious interests of those involved, not according to a concrete
ideological framework. It is, as we shall see, similarly unclear how much economic
thought of the period ‘was honestly motivated by the desire to increase the power of the
state and how much was merely thinly disguised efforts to promote the special interests of
capitalism’ (Hunt and Lautzenheiser 2011, 21).
But while Heckscher’s idea of a unified system of mercantilist theory ‘may easily
give a misleading impression of general agreement among a large group of writers on
economics who in many respects had relatively little in common’ (Sandmo 2011, 18),30
there are nonetheless some recurring ideas regarding the way ‘the government should
manage the economy for the purpose of increasing national wealth and state power’
(Canterbery 2011, 33). This was to be achieved in a number of interrelated ways:
stimulating the output of domestic goods by offering tax exemptions, subsidies, and
regulation to industries producing for export; limiting domestic consumption of luxury
items by putting heavy tariffs on non-raw material imports and raw material exports; and
establishing import and export trade monopolies to prevent competing English merchants
bidding up the price of imports and bidding down the price of exports, all of which would
create a favourable balance of trade and an inflow of bullion (Hunt and Lautzenheiser
2011, 20–22; Sandmo 2011, 19–20; Canterbery 2011, 33–35).
It must be emphasised, however, that these ideas are not present in all early
seventeenth-century economic tracts, and we find stark disagreements between writers
commonly grouped together, or even between different texts by the same writer. Some
representative examples may be found in the two writers commonly considered the first
English mercantilists (Wachtel 2011, 182), Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun.
Misselden’s Free Trade, or the Meanes to Make Trade Florish (1622) claimed that the
English East India Company’s exportation of bullion was a cause of England’s economic
problems (1622, 13–14), while his Circle of Commerce, or the Ballance of Trade in
30
While Forman admits that Misselden and Mun ‘would not have considered themselves of the same school
of thought’ and were in fact ‘often in disagreement with each other’ (2008, 206 n.8), she nonetheless blithely
describes their ‘pamphlet war’ as ‘the mercantilist debate’ (2008, 4).
32
Defence of Free Trade, published the following year, argued that the Company’s bullion
export actually brought more money into the country (1623, 35).31 Mun’s England’s
Treasure by Forraign Trade, published in 1664 but composed in the late 1620s (Gould
1955a, 161; Finkelstein 2000b, n.1), has been described as ‘the manifesto of mercantilism’
(Perrotta 2004, 138). But this tract in fact opposes the hoarding of bullion, arguing that
money not employed in trade is wasted (Mun 1664, 44).
This is not to say, of course, that there are no traditional mercantilist concepts in
these tracts; on the contrary, they are full of them. But that is precisely the issue: in these
writings, mercantilist ideas sit alongside anti-mercantilist attacks on the East India
Company, defence of the exportation of bullion, and opposition to stockpiling money in
England. Philip Stern is right to note that ‘“mercantilist” arguments were hardly as blackand-white as often caricatured’ (2011, 85), and these are indeed confused, contradictory
writings. It therefore seems difficult to maintain Agnar Sandmo’s belief that writers like
Misselden and Mun can be considered part of ‘a particular school of [mercantilist] thought’
(2011, 18).
So if Misselden and Mun are not mercantilists, what term can be used? Andrea
Finkelstein proposes that ‘while the word mercantilism might best be avoided, the
adjective mercantile should still be used to describe this body of thought because the
specific problems addressed in these works … are overwhelmingly those of the importexport merchant’ (2000a, 251). Her premise is valid but her conclusion is problematic,
because merchants are often mentioned in discussions of seventeenth-century economic
thought, and so each use of ‘mercantile’ would require specification and clarification.
While B. E. Supple was able to say in 1959 that ‘it is surely possible, as a convenient
shorthand, to refer loosely to this group of writers as mercantilist on the grounds that their
immediate concern was with questions of a mercantile nature’ (1959, 229), ‘mercantilist’
and ‘mercantile’ can now only be used with careful qualifications and limitations, leaving
31
The exact nature of the relationship between the East India Company and England remains contentious. It
is agreed that the East India Company ‘eventually became a territorial power’ (Robins 2012, 15), partly
because ‘Company rule could be made acceptable on a long-term basis if the Company was perceived as
lawful ruler rather than as a commercial enterprise’ (Farooqui 2007, 47). But while Company sovereignty is
commonly held to have developed as a result of ‘the military and political events that unfolded in India after
1740’ (Bowen 2003, 19), this transition has recently been placed nearer the start of the seventeenth century,
with Rupali Raj Mishra arguing that ‘from its formation the Company existed alongside of and as a part of
the state, carrying out some state functions abroad, and relying on the power of the prerogative for its
existence’ (2010, 15). Philip Stern goes further, proposing that the Company was in fact ‘a body politic on its
own terms’ because it ‘did what early modern governments did: erect and administer law; collect taxes;
provide protection; inflict punishment; perform stateliness; regulate economic, religious, and civic life;
conduct diplomacy and wage war; make claims to jurisdiction over land and sea; cultivate authority over and
obedience from those people subject to its command’ (2011, 8; 5).
33
these terms neither convenient nor shorthand.32 Formulating a new, alternative umbrella
term for writers like Misselden and Mun would merely perpetuate the elision of the
differences between them, and I see no reason to do so.
Lionel Robbins told his students ‘I don’t think you need to worry much about
Edward Misselden’ (1998, 51), but Misselden’s role in the development of seventeenthcentury economic thought is in fact substantial.33 Misselden and his polemical opponent
Gerard de Malynes shared a ‘common scholasticism and Erasmian humanism that shaped
their evidence, argumentative styles, and forms of rhetoric and logic’ (Ogborn 2007, 132),
but their shared methodology came to quite different conclusions, with Misselden
‘support[ing] trade balance theory against Malynes’s view that currency speculation was
the root of all evil’ (Finkelstein 2000b, 8). Misselden begins Free Trade by explaining that
‘it having pleased God to give mee my birth and being in this good Land … I could not but
thinke it my bounded duty, in all humble acknowledgement to Almighty God … to
endeavour to expresse the same, in some publique service for the publique good’ (1622, 1–
2), just as Milton is ‘grateful to God … that [he] was born at a time in the history of [his]
country’ when he could undertake ‘the task of publicly defending … the cause of the
English people and thus of Liberty herself’ (CPW 4:548-9).
In 1616 Misselden had negotiated with the Dutch on behalf of the New Merchant
Adventurers Company to encourage them to lift their prohibition on importing dyed
English cloth, and by the time he wrote Free Trade he was an active member of the
reinstated Merchant Adventurers Company (Grassby 2008). In light of this, he
unsurprisingly devotes much of the tract to defending the Merchant Adventurers against
the charge of monopoly, which he instead levels at the East India Company. While the
Merchant Adventurers and the East India Company were both technically ‘forms of
government-sponsored monopoly’ (Finkelstein 2000a, 62) with members from each
gaining trading privileges in specific markets and commodities, they were two
fundamentally different types of organisation. The East India Company was a joint-stock
company in which anyone could buy shares, and although the active members were
merchants, shareholders all received a proportionate amount of the profit earned by the
32
J. Caitlin Finlayson’s 2010 essay ‘Mercantilism and the Path to Spiritual Salvation in Thomas Heywood’s
Londini Emporia or Londons Mercatura (1633)’ recently demonstrated the continuing ambiguity of
‘mercantilism,’ as it uses the term to denote the collective activities of merchants, not economic theory.
33
The importance of the early seventeenth century in English economic history cannot be overstated.
According to Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘if real wages are a reliable guide to macro-economic performance, the
transition towards modern economic growth in the English economy did not occur in the eighteenth century,
but at some point between the 1590s and the 1620s, when it moved from what was basically a trajectory
without technological progress to one with a higher level of investment and a roughly constant rate of
productivity growth’ (2009, 253–254).
34
company as a whole. The Merchant Adventurers, conversely, were a regulated company to
which qualified merchants could be admitted by their peers after paying an admission fee
or serving an apprenticeship, with each member keeping his own profits or losses
(Finkelstein 2000a, 62).
Critics of regulated companies argued their members were self-serving profiteers,
and Malynes warned that such merchants traded according to what ‘yeeldeth them the most
benefit and gaine: and herein is their particular profit or Privatum Commodum, more
respected than the general good of the common-wealth’ (1622, 59). Misselden’s
observation that ‘the name and nature of Monopoly, is more talk’t of, then well understood
of many’ (1622, 54) is equally true today, and so it will be helpful to define the term as he
understood it: ‘the parts then of a Monopolie are twaine. The restraint of the liberty of
Commerce to some one or few: and the setting of the price at the pleasure of the
Monopolian to his private benefit, and the prejudice of the publique’ (1622, 57).34 It might
well be argued that the Merchant Adventurers were just such a monopoly, but for
Misselden, ‘the key distinction between a monopoly and a properly governed commerce
was not the degree or absence of restraint but the extent to which the restraint benefited the
public good’ (Finkelstein 2000a, 67). Misselden believed ‘the restraint of public liberty …
could be a thing beneficial to the state, under the right circumstances’ (Mishra 2010, 251),
and so he defends the Merchant Adventurers’ ‘Speciall Licence … to transport all sorts of
white Clothes undrest’ because ‘the Utilitie that hereby arose to the Common-wealth, did
farre exceede the restraint of the Publike Libertie’ (1622, 63). He reminds his readers that
the Merchant Adventurers have ‘by their politique rule and order, eaten out the Societie of
the Hans-townes of Germanie and the Merchants of the Entercourse of the Low Countries,
in those trades, which a long time they enjoyed in this land,’ and it is also ‘worthy to be
remembred to their Honour, that service which the Merchants Adventurers did to the State
in Anno. 88 when they supplied the Navie Royall with a whole ships lading of Powder and
Shot from Hamburgh’ (1622, 74–75).
He denies that regulated companies are guilty of monopolism through price-setting,
because ‘it is as impossible as unusuall, for any to have command of the price of their
Commodities: because there is such a multitude of Traders of them; and every man is at
liberty to buy and sell, without any rule by any general order, or meanes to hold one price,’
whereas ‘if there be any that tradeth in a Joint Stocke, and hath the Sole buying and selling
of any Commodity, and buy one and sell the same Jointly, as by one person or common
34
While the word ‘monopoly’ came into English in the mid-sixteenth century (R. Williams 1988, 209), it
appears in extant texts only sporadically until the flurry of economic pamphlets in the 1620s.
35
factor, such is guilty of Monopoly’ (1622, 70).35 Misselden’s partisan interests must be
borne in mind here, however, as Sheilagh Ogilvie reminds us that regulated companies
were no less guilty of ‘price-fixing, supply controls, and other secretive machinations’
(2011, 127) than their joint-stock counterparts.
Regulated companies tended to focus on intracontinental trade, while joint-stock
companies primarily carried intercontinental trade, which created a disparity in their
exports: ‘the Muscovy, Eastland, and Levant companies could fund all or part of the trade
with exports of English woollens or other domestic commodities … the East India
Company, on the other hand, had little or no market for English goods in the regions they
traded, and necessarily relied on exports of silver bullion’ (Mishra 2010, 242).36 This led to
the common charge that joint-stock companies worked against the national interest by
exporting precious bullion, and Misselden too complains that the East India Company has
tied up ‘Stocke … of great value’ so that ‘the Common-wealth hath lost the use and
employment of the Stocke it selfe, and all the encrease of Trade which the same might
have produced, in the severall Trades of the Subjects, whereby abundance of Treasure
might have beene brought into this land in all this time’ (1622, 13–14).
Even if the Merchant Adventurers were not monopolists, the fact remains that other
countries without chartered companies still outperformed England. But Misselden
maintains it does not necessarily ‘follow, that this their better thriving is because every
man is at libertie to be a Merchant at his pleasure’ (1622, 79), as this confuses correlation
and causation. However, Misselden commits exactly this fallacy a few pages later when he
asserts that ‘for France, there are not (that I know) any Companies of Merchants for
forreine parts. Which I take to bee the cause, why those Merchants shipping, is of so small
burthen, and of as little sufficiency for service. Which is an effect of a stragling
ungoverned Trade’ (1622, 81).
But although Misselden opposed monopolies, he was (despite the pamphlet’s title)
no advocate of free trade. Instead, he supported ‘a commercial system coming closest to
that described today as oligopoly: a market dominated by a small number of sellers’
(Finkelstein 2000a, 68). If trade was truly free it would become ‘a receptacle and Rendes-
35
Some joint-stock companies ‘exercised market power quite crudely,’ with the Muscovy Company ‘raising
the price of cordage by 50 percent by not importing for three years’ (Jones and Ville 1996, 911, quoted in
Ogilvie 2011, 130).
36
As Nick Robins explains, this was not a new phenomenon: ‘from Roman times, Europe had always been
Asia’s commercial supplicant, shipping out gold and silver in return for spices, textiles, and other luxury
goods. European traders were attracted to the east for its wealth and sophistication at a time when the western
economy was a fraction the size of Asia’s, and for its first 150 years, the Company had to repeat this practice,
as there was almost nothing that England could export that the East wanted to buy’ (2008, 67).
36
vous for every Shopkeeper, Stragler and Unskilful person’ who would ‘not onely Sinke
themselves and others with them; but also Marre the Merchandize of the land, both in
estimation and in goodnesse’ (Misselden 1622, 87; 85). While opposing monopolies, Free
Trade maintains that ‘the Use of Government is excellent for the restraint of unskilfull and
disorderly trade,’ and we perhaps see the ‘inferiority complex of early seventeenth-century
Englishmen regarding Dutch merchants’ (Coward 2011, 16) in Misselden’s assertion that
the Dutch ‘very much complaine of the disorders of their Trades, for want of that kinde of
Government, which many of them take notice of here in England’ (1622, 54; 83).
Regulated companies, with their strict standards of accreditation, prevent those who prefer
‘their owne liberty, to the utility of the publique’ (1622, 86) from damaging trade. The
solution, Misselden concludes, is to address both ‘too strict’ and too loose forme[s] of
Trade’ (1622, 133), the former by ‘rooting out the name and use of Monopolies from
amongst this Nation,’ by which he meant joint-stock companies.37 The opposite of
monopolies, ungoverned trade, must also be addressed, and Free Trade concludes that
‘where Trade is disordred, and the Traders ungoverned, there they are like a house
devided, which cannot long subsist’(Misselden 1622, 134).38
Free Trade effectively bolstered support against joint-stock companies, and so it
became, in Anthony Milton’s words, ‘imperative for the [East India] Company to defeat its
negative associations as a monopoly by mastering the same terminology as its opponents,
claiming that the Company was acting in the public interest, and preserving the
commonweal’ (2007, 170). Shortly after the publication of Free Trade, the East India
Company appointed Misselden both a member and a commissioner in Holland, and so in
The Circle of Commerce we find him, unsurprisingly, a vocal supporter of the Company.
One of his central concerns in the tract is addressing the accusation that ‘the cause of our
want of money is the ready monies sent to the East Indies’ (1623, 34). Those who
criticised the bullion export of the East India Company took a reductive view of the trade,
mistaking a cycle for a one-way process: ‘the Company traded primarily bullion … for
calico and indigo, some of which went back to Europe but much of which was in turn used
to barter for spices that were then sent back to England and sold there or re-exported to
Europe (or even the Levant) to acquire the necessary bullion – purchasing power – with
37
Joint-stock companies might also be considered an example of loosely governed trade, as anyone who
could afford shares could play a role in the East India Company, unlike the Merchant Adventurers, who only
admitted merchants approved by fellow merchants.
38
While Finkelstein suggests that this ‘adage … cast a shadow as far forward in time as the American Civil
War’ (2000a, 67), the obvious point of reference here is not Lincoln, but Jesus: ‘every citie or house divided
against it selfe, shall not stand’ (Matt. 12:25), and ‘a house divided against a house, falleth’ (Luke 11:17).
37
which the cycle would begin again’ (Forman 2004, 613). While Misselden was (through
ignorance or omission) silent on this point in Free Trade, the Circle of Commerce
proclaims that ‘one hundred thousand pounds imployed in that trade, and returned from the
East Indies, in Spices, Callicoes, & Indico, besides the hopes of the Persian trade of Rawe
Silks, will yield Five hundred thousand pounds to this Kingdome’ (1623, 35).
The Circle of Commerce is important not only because it recognises the cyclical
nature of investment, but also because it is the first appearance in print of the term ‘balance
of trade’ (Suprinyak 2011b, 15).39 While the balance of trade was largely ignored in Free
Trade, in the Circle of Commerce Misselden cannot overstate its importance:
If there bee any virtue in the Theorick part of Commerce, that might attract a
Princes Eie to be cast upon it; surely it is in this kinde of Exchange, that one
Country maketh with another in the Ballance of Trade. All the mysteries of other
Exchanges are hidde in this mystery. All the knowledge of Commerce, is presented
and represented to the life in this story, in this history. All the rivers of Trade spring
out of this source, and empt[y] themselves againe into this Ocean. All the waight of
Trade falles to this Center, & comes within the circuit of this Circle. (1623, 142)
But even while championing the primacy of the balance of trade, Misselden is keenly
aware of its potential problems, as he recognises that as ‘he that waigheth a draught, either
with false waights, or such as are of different standards, can never tell whether he get or
lose by his waight: even so in the Ballance of Trade, if either the Collections be imperfect,
or the forme of the Ballance different; you shall never knowe whether the Kingdome
gaineth or loseth, by the cast of the Scale in the Ballance of Trade’ (1623, 126). While this
anticipates Adam Smith’s objection regarding the inaccuracy of customs books, it does not
answer it. Misselden proposes that a commission of ‘some of his Majesties principall
Fermers of his Highnes Customes, and … some of the most expert & judicious Merchants
of the City of London’ meet annually to decide on a ‘constant Forme’ by which the balance
of trade could be calculated, and he goes on for three pages to carry out such calculations
39
For a history of the term, see W. H. Price, ‘The Origin of the Phrase “Balance of Trade,”’ The Quarterly
Journal of Economics 20, 1 (1905), 157–167. Misselden was not the first to use the term, however, as in
1615 the surveyor-general of the customs, Lionel Cranfield, prepared a document for parliament tallying
imports and exports entitled ‘Sir Lionel Cranfield his balance of trade’ (Price 1905, 165). Forman mistakenly
credits Misselden and Mun with introducing the idea of the balance of trade (2008, 4), whereas in fact John
Hales’s Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England (1549) had warned ‘we must alwaies take
hede that we bie no more of strangers then we sell them; for so wee sholde empoverishe owr selves and
enriche them’ (1971, 63).
38
(1623, 126–129). He concludes that ‘wee are fallen into a great Under-ballance of Trade
with other Nations’ (1623, 130), empirically asserting ‘wee felt it before in sense; but now
we know it in science: wee found it before in operation; but now wee see it in speculation’
(1623, 130). But as Adam Smith emphasised, the primary problem with calculating the
balance of trade is not one of methodology, but of data: ‘it is in the interest of merchant
importers, in a system of import duties and bounties on exports, to declare very little. It is
in the interest of merchant exporters to declare a great deal, sometimes out of vanity and
sometimes to gain bounties’ (Rothschild and Sen 2006, 339). Misselden is aware of the
need for both methodological consistency (‘forme’), and accurate data (‘collections’), but
only offers a solution for the methodological side. He overlooks the fact that the
sophistication of a statistical model is irrelevant if inaccurate figures are fed into it.
Nevertheless, Misselden maintains that
in the Provinciall Exchange betweene Country and County, the gaine or losse
which one Kingdome maketh upon another, cannot bee knowne until the Returnes
thereof bee made: that is, till the forraine Commodities bee brought in, for the
Native Commodities issued and carried out; and both cast into the Ballance of
Trade, to bee waighed and tried one against the other. (1623, 116)
Misselden thus formulates, I argue, an economic felix culpa: the East India Company
exported bullion, and viewed in isolation this appeared to damage the national interest
because silver and gold were the ‘sinews of war’. A round trip to the East Indies usually
took about a year (Roy 2012, 45), so when considerable quantities of England’s most
important asset were exported with no immediate return, it prompted vocal consternation at
home. But eventually the Company ships returned laden with ‘forraine Commodities’ for
consumption or re-export, and the initial investment was recouped with substantial profit.40
While Misselden’s tracts are often bogged down by learned allusions and
digressions, in Thomas Mun we find economic discourse edging away from art and
towards science. Mun used ‘a plain and declarative mode of writing’ characterised by a
‘typographical avoidance of the trappings of scholastic erudition … and appeal to the
40
It might well be objected that there is a disparity between the economic cycle of investment-profitreinvestment and the finality of the spiritual felix culpa. Trade is, of course, a circular process, but if one
cycle of trade is taken as beginning with the exportation of gold and ending when the commodities bought
with that gold are themselves sold for either a greater quantity of gold or exchanged for commodities of
greater value, the felix culpa’s transformation of loss into profit remains a viable common model for both
economic and spiritual endeavours.
39
authority of number’ (Ogborn 2007, 134; 137), which provided an ideal ‘intellectual
framework for the [East India] Company’s policies and practices for most of the
seventeenth century’ (Riddick 2006, 127). England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade begins
with a classic declaration of balance of trade theory: ‘the ordinary means therefore to
encrease our wealth and treasure is by Forraign Trade, wherein wee must ever observe this
rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of their in value’ (Mun 1664, 11).
Mun follows Misselden in asserting the primacy of the balance of trade:
so much Treasure only will be brought in or carried out of a Commonwealth, as the
Forraign Trade doth over or under ballance in value. And this must come to pass by
a Necessity beyond all resistance. So that all other courses (which tend not to this
end) howsoever they may seem to force mony into a Kingdom for a time, yet are
they (in the end) not only fruitless but also hurtful: they are like to violent flouds
which bear down their banks, and suddenly remain dry again for want of waters.
(1664, 219)
But while England’s Treasure contains the now standard balance of trade theory, it takes a
more progressive approach to the zero-sum model of trade. Mun’s former conservatism
was evident in A Discourse of Trade (1621), which warned that if the East India Company
were disbanded, the Dutch ‘with more gladnesse would undertake the whole Trade to the
East Indies,’ and ‘thus should the Dutch increase their honour, wealth and strength, while
we abate, grow poore and weake at Sea for want of Trade’ (1621, 48-49). Even if England
were to withdraw from the East Indies, this would only ‘keepe our Silver from hence’
momentarily until it went to ‘pay [the Dutch] a double price, or what they please, for all
those wares which we shall want for our necessities’ (1621, 48–49). But England’s
Treasure softens the zero-sum rhetoric, as Mun argues ‘in our exportations we must not
only regard our own superfluities, but also we must consider our neighbours necessities,
that so upon the wares which they cannot want, nor yet be furnished thereof elsewhere, we
may … gain so much of the manufacture as we can, and also endeavour to sell them dear,
so far forth as the high price cause not a less vent in the quantity’ (1664, 17). Rather than
bullheadedly exporting English manufactures as widely and for as high a price as possible,
Mun proposes that an approach more sensitive to the needs of the market will be more
profitable. This awareness of the value of the neighbours’ market was also recognised by
Adam Smith, who believed ‘the wealth of a neighbouring nation, … though dangerous in
40
war and politicks, is certainly advantageous in trade’ (1976, 494) because ‘the richer the
neighbours with whom a country traded, the better off it would become, because rich
neighbours are better customers for industrious people’ (Kennedy 2010, 137). As Smith
explains, the zero-sum model actually damages trade relations, because
as a rich man is likely to be a better customer to the industrious people in his
neighbourhood, than a poor, so is likewise a rich nation. A rich man, indeed, who is
himself a manufacturer, is a very dangerous neighbour to all those who deal in the
same way. All the rest of the neighbourhood, however, by far the greatest number,
profit by the good market which his expence affords them. They even profit by his
underselling the poorer workmen who deal in the same way with him. (1976, 494)
Mun also anticipated Smith in recognising that currency manipulation could only bring
short-term benefits, warning that the ‘divers ways and means whereby to procure plenty of
mony into a Kingdom’ does not ‘enrich but rather empoverish[es] the same by the several
inconveniences which ever accompany such alterations’ (1664, 51). He warned that
melting plate into coin ‘would cause Plenty of mony for a time, yet should we be nothing
the richer, but rather this treasure being thus altered is made the more apt to be carried out
of the Kingdom’ and so ‘our treasure will soon be exhausted’ (1664, 51). The tract devotes
an entire chapter to the problem of currency debasement, which Mun opposes due to its
impact on both domestic and foreign finances.
While a debasement appears to increase the amount of money held by the crown,
Mun emphasises that this increase is both short-lived and ultimately illusory. ‘Lightning of
all our mony’ brings ‘a present benefit’ to the Mint, but it does this ‘once only,’ and
actually ultimately reduces royal wealth (1664, 73). A debasement swells the royal coffers,
but with money of less intrinsic value, and so the ‘present benefit’ is soon ‘lost again in the
future great In-comes of His Majesty, when by this means they must be paid yearly with
mony of less intrinsique value then formerly’ (1664, 73). For Mun, currency is ‘the true
measure … of our forraign commerce with strangers and so [it] therefore ought to be kept
just and constant’ (1664, 71–72). Lessening the intrinsic and increasing the nominal value
of English money is risky because it ‘is not the denomination of our pounds shilling and
pence, which is respected, but the intrinsique value of our Coins’ (1664, 72), and since
‘other Princes are vigilant in these cases to alter presently in proportion with us’ (1664, 76)
any advantage is soon negated. Foreign merchants are just as capable as their princes of
upsetting English trading, as ‘if the stranger-merchant bring in his wares, and find that our
41
moneys are raised, shall not he likewise keep his Commodities until he may sell them
dearer?’ And shall not the price of the Merchants exchange with forraign Countries rise in
proportion with our Moneys?’ (1664, 76–77) Mun concludes that all these observations
‘being undoubtedly true, why may not our Moneys be carried out of the Kingdom as well
and to as much profit after the raising thereof, as before the alteration?’ (1664, 77).
Having shown how the various means proposed to ‘bring in store of money’ leave
the country ‘nothing the richer’ because ‘such treasure so gotten [cannot] long remain with
us’ (1664, 52–53), Mun goes on to suggest that, even if it were possible for the nation to
accumulate a lasting store of money, it would not be beneficial to do so. For Mun, ‘too
much wealth was as dangerous for society as too much poverty’ (Finkelstein 2000a, 88),
and plenitude was damaging for both economic and moral reasons: not only does ‘plenty of
mony in a Kingdom … make the native commodities dearer’ (1664, 43–44), but ‘this great
plenty which we enjoy, makes us a people not only vicious and excessive, wastful of the
means we have, but also improvident & careless of much other wealth that shamefully we
lose’ (1664, 178). But for Mun, the strongest argument against stockpiling money was
simple: ‘when wee have gained some store of mony by trade, wee lose it again by not
trading with our mony’ (1664, 44). He observes that men who are ‘worth five or ten
thousand l.’ are rarely
possessed thereof all together or at once, for it were vanity and against their profit
to keep continually in their hands above forty or fifty pounds in a family to defray
necessary charges, the rest must ever run from man to man in traffique for their
benefit, whereby we may conceive that a little mony … doth rule and distribute
great matters daily to all men in their just proportions. (1664, 74)
This prefigures Adam Smith’s definition of capital: when a man ‘possesses stock sufficient
to maintain him for months or years, he naturally endeavours to derive a revenue from the
greater part of it … the part which … is to afford him this revenue, is called his capital’
(1976, 279). Smith’s ‘critique of the mercantilists was that in putting one asset, the national
gold stock, at the centre of policy, they supported policies that increased the stock of gold
but reduced national net worth at market prices’ (Foley 2006, 171),41 and he insisted
41
Foley’s book Adam’s Fallacy is intriguingly subtitled A Guide to Economic Theology, but sadly it is
nothing of the sort. Foley ‘call[ed] this book a “guide to economic theology” to underline what seems to
[him] the fundamental point that at its most abstract and interesting level, economics is a speculative
philosophical discourse, not a deductive or inductive science’ (2006, xiv–xv), and theology plays no further
role in his thesis beyond this introductory invocation of the term.
42
instead ‘wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver; but in what money
purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing. Money, no doubt, makes always a part of
the national capital; but it has already been shown that it generally makes a small part, and
always the most unprofitable part of it’ (1976, 438).
Carlos Suprinyak numbers Mun among the writers by whom ‘money (that is,
precious metals) was regarded as a preferable form of wealth due to its durability – a form
of wealth which could not be consumed’ (2011a, 468), but this is problematic. Mun
emphasised that money in itself was not a preferable form of wealth, since money
accumulated was inert and yielded no profit. Like Smith, Mun believed money was only
useful when it was invested in trade and thus transformed into capital. Money’s true value
was therefore rooted not in its durability, but in its protean potential, its ability to be
consumed in exchange for commodities which would themselves later be exchanged for a
profit, and thus we see that for Mun, ‘it is in the circulation, that is, in the very repetition,
that value is produced’ (Forman 2008, 16). The importance of capital in England’s
Treasure has recently been gestured towards by the suggestion that ‘there were mercantilist
writers who emphasised that the wealth of a country also included natural resources and
real capital’ (Sandmo 2011, 19–20), but Sandmo overlooks Mun’s careful distinction
between the relative worth of natural resources and real capital:
our own natural wares doe not yield us so much profit as our industrie[.] For Iron
oar in the Mines is of no great worth, when it is compared with the employment
and advantage it yields being digged, tried, transported, bought, sold, cast into
Ordnance, Muskets, and many other instruments of war for offence and defence,
wrought into Anchors, bolts, spikes, nayles and the like, for the use of Ships,
Houses, Carts, Coaches, Ploughs, and other instruments for Tillage. Compare our
Fleece-wools with our Cloth, which requires shearing, washing, carding, spinning,
Weaving, fulling, dying, dressing and other trimmings, and we shall find these Arts
more profitable than the natural wealth. (1664, 32–33)
Here, Mun again urges the transformation of commodities into more capital, and so,
whether discussing wool or gold bullion, his attitude is the same: a commodity stockpiled
is a commodity squandered. Moreover, Mun reminds us that great profits could only be
achieved with similarly sizeable investments, as ‘where the voyages are short & the wares
rich … the profit will be far less’ than in trading in ‘remote Countreys’ (1664, 39), and so
43
the immense profit margins of long-distance trade would ‘eclips[e] start-up expenses in
gold and silver’ (Barbour 2003, 95).42
Mun ‘stressed that the initial outlay had to be understood in terms of its final
return’ (Finkelstein 2000a, 92), and he drew the parallel to sowing: ‘if we only behold the
actions of the husbandman in the seed-time when we casteth away much good corn into the
ground, we will rather accompt him a mad man than a husbandman: but when we consider
his labours in the harvest which is the end of his endeavours, we find the worth and
plentiful encrease of his actions’ (1664, 50). Mun urged his readers to take the longer view
and recognise that while each investment was indeed a loss in isolation, it brought ultimate
profit. The circular trade sketched in England’s Treasure redeems the initial expense, and
so Mun rejoices with Adam ‘that all this good of evil shall produce / And evil turn to good’
(PL 12.470-471), just as Milton’s theodicy maintains that casting away the ‘good corn’ of
Edenic innocence was a worthwhile investment when recouped in heaven.43
Conceptions of investment are central to covenant theology, which was theology
taken from the dusty bluster of scholastic disputations into the throng of the marketplace.
Covenant theologians believed the merchant had as much need to learn his paternoster as
the plowman, and so they made their sermons accessible by condensing theological ideas
into mercantile metaphors. In the preface to his Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642),
originally published in Latin as Medulla theologiae (1629), William Ames anticipated
objections to ‘this whole manner of writing, that the sum of Divinity should be brought
into a short compend’ (1642, A4). While conceding that some ‘desire great Volumes,
wherein they may loosely either dwell, or wander’ (1642, A4), he concluded that since ‘all
have not so great leasure … the condition of many doth rather require, that the nest it selfe,
or the seat of the matter which they pursue, bee shewed without any more adoe’ (1642,
A4).44 In this regard, readers of the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries do not differ,
42
As in Misselden’s Circle of Commerce, Mun proposes that ‘100000.l. being sent in our Shipping to the
East Countreys’ will buy stock ‘which being after brought into England and housed, to export the same at the
best time for vent thereof in Spain or Italy, it cannot yield less in those parts than two hundred thousand
pounds’ (1664, 38).
43
Forman has rightly identified a tension here with regards to Protestant salvation being sola gratia: ‘on the
one hand, it is possible to equate loss/expenditure with sowing. But on the other, the logic of infinite return in
exchange for nothing emphasises not a restricted economy, in which there is a need for return because of
scarcity, but instead the potential for profit, growth, and expansion, that is not dependent on man’s own
deserving labour, but on the grace of God’ (2008, 13). We must be careful here, however, to remember that
Milton was an atypical Protestant; his salvation was indeed by grace alone, but man could choose to reject
God’s offered grace, bringing bilateralism back into the covenant relationship.
44
The Christian Doctrine serves a similar purpose, opening with Milton’s claim that ‘I do not teach anything
new in this work. I aim only to assist the reader’s memory by collecting together, as it were, into a single
book texts which are scattered here and there throughout the Bible, and by systematising them under definite
headings, in order to make reference easy’ (CPW 6:127).
44
and so ‘the sum’ of early seventeenth-century English covenant theology shall now be
‘brought into a short compend.’
Since ‘the most common root of confusion in theology is misunderstanding terms’
(Olson 2006, 15), this section will begin with a discussion of the definition and
development of the relevant theological terminology. ‘Federal theology’ and ‘covenant
theology’ are often used interchangeably (Baker and McCoy 1991, 11–12; Carr 2009, 3
n.7), since ‘federal’ derives from the Latin foedus, meaning ‘covenant.’ According to J.
Wayne Baker and Charles S. McCoy, modern ‘academic specialisation … [has] separated
federal and covenantal. Political thought has appropriated federalism as applicable to
certain political patterns of the modern world. Biblical studies and theology have kept the
word “covenant”’ (1991, 12). Theological and political discourses were not so discreet in
the seventeenth century, 45 but because ‘covenant’ is the term most commonly used in the
theological tracts discussed in this thesis, and ‘federal’ is an apt description of the political
system of diffused autonomy that Milton came to favour, this thesis will maintain the
distinction of ‘covenant’ as theological and ‘federal’ as political.
Covenant theology was a soteriological framework built around the prelapsarian
covenant of works and the postlapsarian covenant of grace. The doctrine was initially
popularised by puritans both north and south of the English border in the late sixteenth
century, and flourished in early seventeenth-century English theological thought before
being enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647.46 Scholarly disagreement
45
Leviathan’s flitting between religious and political senses of ‘covenant’ is representative: ‘the Pacts and
Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble
that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation’ (Hobbes 2012, 2:16). For examples of
other political orders founded on covenants, see Charles S. McCoy, ‘Federalism: The Lost Tradition?’,
Publius 31, 2 (2001), 1-14, p.7. For further discussions of the interconnected nature of early modern uses of
‘covenant,’ see Brent James Brodie, ‘The Prevalence of the Magistrate in the Political Thought of Heinrich
Bullinger,’ (MA Thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2012), Edward Vallance, ‘“An Holy and
Sacramentall Paction”: Federal Theology and the Solemn League and Covenant in England,’ The English
Historical Review 116, 465 (2001), 50-75, and Craig Smith, ‘“Great Reformation in the Manners of
Mankind”: Utopian Thought in the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment,’ Utopian Studies 16, 2 (2005),
221-245. For a twentieth-century example, see Barbara Allen, ‘Martin Luther King’s Civil Disobedience and
the American Covenant Tradition’, Publius 30, 4 (2000), 71-113.
46
It might be objected that since Milton’s puritan credentials, particularly in his youth, are now seriously
questioned, any connections drawn between the poet and puritan theology are problematic. But covenant
theology was not an exclusively puritan phenomenon; for a survey of the Anglican covenant tradition, see
Michael McGiffert, ‘Henry Hammond and Covenant Theology,’ Church History 74, 2 (2005), 255-285. I
follow N. H. Keeble’s recent definition of puritanism as ‘a dissatisfaction with the present realisation of
Christian ideals and a consequent determination to reform practice and institutions. Its various strategies and
platforms shared a desire to recover for individuals and congregations the purity of doctrine, the simplicity of
worship, the commitment of ministry, and the integrity of faith that (it was believed) had characterised the
early, or “primitive,” church before the growth of the ascendancy of Rome over western Christendom had led
(so it was held) to the corruption of the Christian gospel and church’ (2012a, 307). While Milton has been
considered one of ‘the great puritans’ (Spurr 1998, 47) and a ‘key puritan’ (Cambers 2011, 254), such
characterisations have recently become more tenuous. Certainly, Milton eventually ‘embodie[d] the extreme
45
persists regarding the beginnings of covenant theology. Brian Lee has noted the ‘tendency
to overemphasise the novelty of federal thought’ (2009, 17), and John Wood argues that
since we find in the second-century Church Father Irenaeus ‘the notion … that Adam
related to God in … a covenant relationship [,] … Irenaeus could even be described (albeit
anachronistically) as a federal theologian’ (2008, 133; 134).47 But merely mentioning
covenants between Adam and God does not make a theologian covenantal; after all, ‘the
term “covenant” occurs at least 300 times’ in the Bible (Golding 2004, 13).48 The covenant
concept did not gain theological prominence until the second decade of the sixteenth
century, when within a few short years many continental reformers – Oecolampadius at
Basle, Bullinger and Pelican at Zurich, Musculus at Augsburg, and Bucer and Martyr at
Strasbourg – laid increasing emphasis on the covenant in their writings (Golding 2004, 35).
Donald McKim suggests that ‘because the covenant doctrine was not yet developed as an
organising principle of theology in these theologians, “it is probably wisest to speak of a
theology of covenant rather than covenant theology, so far as the sixteenth century is
development of puritan belief and practice’ (S. M. Fallon 2007, 21), but it is now apparent that ‘Milton came
from a non-Puritan family, one keen on ritual and ceremony and stained glass and organ music in the church,
and involved in non-Puritan entertainments such as plays,’ and would have been considered a high church
Anglican until ‘his radicalisation in 1637’ (Campbell 2010, 14). However, even in his post-radicalisation
writings, Milton differs from his puritan peers in a crucial regard: ‘where anxious self-examination and
conviction of sin is a Protestant norm enforced by Lutheran and Calvinist theology, Milton writes instead of
his blamelessness and heroic virtue’ (S. M. Fallon 2007, 21). Catherine Martin has developed Fallon’s
emphasis on Milton’s cool self-assurance, concluding that in light of ‘how slender the [biographical and
ideological] evidence for the puritanism of either Milton or his family actually is, … Milton was not a
puritan’ (C. G. Martin 2010, 8; xi). But ‘it cannot be said that Milton was never influenced by puritan
thought’ (C. G. Martin 2010, 20), and therefore the parallels drawn in this thesis between covenant theology,
a predominantly puritan ideology, and Milton’s own thought remain tenable, regardless of whether or not
Milton can himself be considered a puritan.
47
David Weir, making no mention of Irenaeus, claims that Augustine, ‘alone amongst the fathers of the
church, spoke of a prelapsarian covenant with Adam’ (1990, 12), citing City of God: ‘the first covenant,
made with the first man, is certainly this: “on the day you eat, you will surely die” (St. Augustine 1972, 688).
Michael Horton concurs that ‘the basic elements of the covenant of creation can even be discerned in
Augustine's claim: “The first covenant was this, unto Adam: “whensoever thou eatest thereof thou shalt die
the death,” and this is why all his children “are breakers of God’s covenant made with Adam in
paradise”’(Horton 2006, 84; (St. Augustine 1972, 688–689)). Although he uses quotation marks, Horton is
actually paraphrasing Augustine, not quoting. Despite using the same 1972 Penguin edition and giving the
same page reference as Weir, Horton’s first quote from Augustine should read as given in Weir’s citation
above, and in the second quotation Augustine describes children as ‘breakers of the Law that was given in
Paradise’ (1972, 689), not as ‘breakers of God’s covenant made with Adam in paradise’ (Horton 2006, 84).
48
Even in Genesis 1-3 ‘we recognise the features of a covenant …: a historical prologue setting the stage
(Genesis 1-2), stipulations (2:16-17), and sanctions (2:17b) over which Eve and the serpent argue (3:1-5) and
which are finally carried out in the form of judgement (3:8-19). It is only after this fateful decision that an
entirely new and unexpected basis is set forth for human destiny (3:21-24)’ (Horton 2006, 89–90). James
Torrance enumerates a selection of other biblical covenants of various scales, both personal and national:
‘God makes among others a covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15 and 17) and later renews that covenant at
Sinai (Exodus 6). David makes a covenant with Jonathan (I Samuel 18:4) and, again, with the elders of the
tribes of Israel when he becomes a king (II Samuel 5:3). Jeremiah speaks of a day when God will make a
new covenant with the house of Israel (Jeremiah 31:31-34) and in the New Testament, Jesus is presented as
mediator of the new covenant: “this cup is the new covenant in my blood” (I Corinthians 11:25; Hebrews
12:24)’ (2000, 143).
46
concerned”’’ (McKim 1983, 89, citing Breward 1970, 90), but this statement entirely
overlooks Heinrich Bullinger.
Bullinger has been described as ‘the founder of Reformed … federal theology,’ and
his One and Eternal Testament or Covenant of God (1534) was ‘the first treatise to be
published on covenant’ (Baker 2000, 26). Moving beyond his theological predecessors’
occasional references to covenant, Bullinger placed the idea at the centre of his theological
system, and so ‘it is not so much that new elements of the covenant appear in his own
work, but that the doctrine itself begins to demand its own autonomy in his theology’
(Strehle 1988, 134–5). By ‘organis[ing] the whole of theology under the banner of
covenant’ (R. M. Allen 2010, 39) Bullinger evidently qualifies as a covenant theologian,
and the One and Eternal Testament was no anomaly; his Decades were also ‘entirely
structured by the covenant idea’ (Vos 1980, 236). Bullinger was a crucial influence on the
emergence of English covenant theology, since ‘Zürich had attracted numerous Puritan
expatriates under the persecutions of Bloody Queen Mary’ (Carr 2009, 5). The Decades
became ‘a clergy textbook’ under Elizabeth, and even ‘as late as 1600, … the official
Church of England was marching to rhythms set in Zürich between the 1530s and 1550s’
(MacCulloch 2007, 932; 933).
In the Decades, ‘the covenaunte of God, whereby hee is joyned to us, and wee to
him’ is shaped by divine condescension: ‘God in making of leagues, as he doth in all
things else, applieth him selfe to our capacities, & imitateth the order which men use in
making confederacies’ (Bullinger 1577, 234; 355). Man’s ‘leagues … do precisely
expresse what they be that make the confederacie, upon what conditions, and howe farre
the covenant shall extend,’ and God’s ‘league or covenante with mankinde’ is similarly
conditional (1577, 355). In this bilateral agreement, ‘there are two poyntes or especiall
conditions … the first whereof declareth what God doth promise … the second
comprehendeth the duetie of man’ (1577, 56). Bullinger outlines the duties of each party:
‘God for his parte sayeth, I will bee thy God … and the God of thy seede after thee,’ while
man must ‘take him for their God, to sticke to him alone, who is their onely all in all, to
call uppon him alone, to worshippe him alone, and through his Messiah to looke for
sanctification & life everlasting’ (1577, 356; 357).
While the English Reformation was ‘indebted to a number of continental
influences, including … Bullinger, … by the later sixteenth century Calvin’s influence
became predominant’ (Doerkson 2012, 200), and although Calvin ‘recognise[d] the
47
covenant as a biblical theme, … he did not structure his theology in the way the federal
theologians did’ (van Asselt 2001, 326–327).49 Some scholars demarcate ‘two alternative,
though related strands within the Reformed tradition – federalism and Calvinism’ (Baker
and McCoy 1991, 24), and indeed, both Calvinists and covenant theologians affirm the
covenants of works and the covenant of grace. But Calvin’s doctrine of double
predestination meant that the covenant of grace (or its deprivation in damnation) could not
be conditional like Bullinger’s, since ‘the covenant of life is not preached equally among
all men, … God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those who he long
before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other
hand, he would devote to destruction’ (Calvin 1960, 920; 931). Calvin’s covenant was
unilateral. It was a decree, not a deal.
By the seventeenth century, many English covenant theologians understood the
covenant between man and God as contingent on man’s fulfilment of God’s condition:
‘walke before me, and be thou perfect’ (Gen. 17:1).50 According to Victoria Kahn and
others, this left predestination ‘no longer simply a matter of divine fiat, but of the
individual believer’s response to a divine call. While covenant theologians insisted that the
ability to respond was itself a gift of grace, the practical effect of covenant theology was to
lessen the harshness of Calvinist predestination’ (Kahn 1995, 86).51 But R. Michael Allen
objects to readings which ‘take the Reformed doctrine of predestination to be unilateral
and to exclude human action from any sphere of meaning or ultimacy’ as an interpretation
which ‘gets neither predestination nor covenant right’ (2010, 45). Allen maintains that
there is
49
The exact relationship between Calvin and the later covenant theologians remains contentious; for van
Asselt, ‘a direct line running from Calvin to the later covenant theologians certainly cannot be proved’ (2001,
327), while Jeong Koo Jeon maintains that ‘there is a covenantal theological continuity’ here (2004, 14).
50
God appears less demanding in the Geneva Bible, which translates the verse as ‘walke before me, and be
thou upright’ (Gen. 17:1). John Wesley, the prominent eighteenth-century Arminian and co-founder of
Methodism, glossed this quote thus: ‘that upright walking with God is the condition of our interest in his allsufficiency. If we neglect him, or dissemble with him, we forfeit the benefit of our relation to him’ (1765,
68).
51
Although unacknowledged, Kahn is here following earlier commentators such as Stephen Strehle, and
McCoy and Baker. Strehle observed that Bullinger’s covenant was ‘in essence a bilateral commitment, and as
such must incorporate and depend upon some human contribution towards its fulfilment,’ and so despite
‘affirm[ing] the Protestant watchword of justification by faith, [Bullinger’s] impetus upon federal conditions
… does tend to lapse from Luther and his sola fides toward a covert doctrine of works’ (Strehle 1988, 137;
136). For McCoy and Baker, William Perkins’s Golden Chaine (1591) ‘blunted the rigidity of the double
predestination system of the high Calvinist rationalists and gave it a more humane face’ (1991, 41).
48
a bilateral element in divinely decreed human activity. The elect are ‘predestined to
be conformed to the image of his Son’ (Rom 8:29); thus conformity and ethical
service are incumbent upon those chosen. While God’s grace is not conditional or
based upon such action, such action does truly follow from this grace. Similarly,
the covenants are unilaterally bestowed by God, who did not ask for Adam or
Israel’s permission to sketch such a frame for fellowship. Yet such covenants
involve bilateral conditions with real human obligations, so that their maintenance
is dependent upon creaturely action. Contrary to some descriptions, then, covenant
and predestination are parallel and compatible concepts. (2010, 45)52
As Charles Butler observes, ‘Reformed covenant theology was not, of course, of one mind’
(2000, 102), and this is especially true of English covenant theology in the 1620s and
1630s. While Allen has recognised that unilateralism and bilateralism coexist in the
covenant relationship, this is not to say that every covenant theologian offered an
appropriately balanced representation of the covenant. Tracts of this period run the gamut
from fiercely Calvinist assertions of the unilateralism and irresistibility of God’s will as
expressed through the covenant, to emphases on the conditionality of the covenant
relationship and Arminian assertions of man’s ability to reject God’s offered grace. The
three theologians discussed here – William Ames, John Preston, and Thomas Hooker – can
be approximately positioned on a spectrum between unilateralism (Ames) and bilateralism
(Hooker), with Preston in the middle.
Movement towards the bilateral end of the continuum is accompanied by a marked
increase in the use of economic vocabulary and metaphors. This is likely because ‘to
formulate a theology that accommodated lay spiritual interests, Puritan clerics had to create
one that was intellectually intelligible to ordinary laypersons … [so they] borrowed a
contractual idiom from secular life to translate major points of Calvinist doctrine into a
relatively simple divinity’ (Zaret 1985, 129). Just as the God of Bullinger’s Decades
‘appeal[ed] to man’s capacities’ (Raath 2000, 93), so too covenant theologians found it
52
While readings like Allen’s are still in the minority, even those who still maintain that covenant theology
ameliorated predestination now do so in a more nuanced way. See, for example, Catherine Martin’s argument
that ‘moderate Puritans such as … John Preston significantly softened high Calvinist teaching on
predestination, although … [ he] retained the classical Calvinist emphasis on orthodoxy and rectitude’ (2010,
38).
49
easiest to reach an audience immersed in the marketplace by drawing analogies between
the bilateral divine-human relationship and the business agreements of everyday life.53
William Ames was not only ‘one of the most astute theologians of the second
Reformation’ (van Asselt 2001, 27), but one of ‘the leading English federalists at the
beginning of the seventeenth century’ (Golding 2004, 51). He ‘had grown up in a merchant
home and for years lived among the mercantile Dutch, with the result that he became
conditioned to the realities of a trading, acquisitive society’ (Sprunger 1972, 175), and his
affinity with the mercantile mindset would have lent covenant theology a particular appeal.
Ames constructed his theology along Ramist lines by presenting ‘principles subdivided and
further subdivided into minute specific terms,’ and Milton followed suit in the Christian
Doctrine by ‘proceeding from core concepts like God and the Trinity to the duties of the
individual Christian’ (Limouze 2012, 311).54 Keeble’s recent summary of Ames’s
significance underlines the theologian’s influence on Milton: Ames ‘enjoyed a European
reputation for De conscientia, ejus jure et casibus (1632, translated into English in 1639),
the first Protestant treatise on casuistry, which Milton owned [, and] for his work of
systematic theology, Medulla sacrae theologia (1627, translated into English in 1642 as
The Marrow of Sacred Divinity), which was among the works Milton studied for his own
system of divinity and from which, in the heterodox De doctrina christiana, he came to
dissent’ (2012b, 10).55
Ames and Milton were not unique in using the same Ramist method for different
theological ends, since ‘Arminius, who also made use of Ramist analysis … came to rather
different conclusions than [William] Perkins on key matters such as predestination and free
will’ (Blacketer 2005, 41). Ames was on the front lines of the debates between Calvinists
and Arminians in the Netherlands,56 as between 1613 and 1618 he wrote four anti-
53
Mark Valeri notes that ‘during the seventeenth century, the dominant teaching in Christian Europe about
usury changed …: at the beginning of the century, most Western Christians read Scripture to include
strictures against the exchange of credit for profit, and at the end of the century, they read Scripture to allow
for it’ (2011, 144).
54
It would be more accurate to say that antitrinitarianism is one of the core concepts of the Christian
Doctrine; the Trinity is only a core concept insofar as Milton spends a portion of the treatise rejecting it as
unscriptural.
55
As Michael Lieb notes, ‘Milton cites Ames directly and indirectly (but not always with approval) in The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and in Tetrachordon as well [CPW 2:232, 275; 610]’ (Lieb 2006, 283
n.14).
56
We must remember that in Milton’s time, ‘the term “Arminian” carried two different but equally pejorative
meanings. Puritans, because they saw a link between Romanising sacramentalism and antagonism to a strict
Calvinist understanding of predestination and election, applied the term to William Laud’s high-church party.
The term was also used to condemn arguments that explicitly attacked absolute predestination. While Milton
can be termed an Arminian in the latter sense, he shared puritan antipathy to the high-church “Arminian”
50
Arminian polemics, ‘three in his dispute with the Rotterdam preacher Nicholas
Grevinchoven and one a detailed critique of the five major points of the Hague
Remonstrance’ (Krop 2011, 63).57 The latter must have particularly caught the attention of
the Dutch Calvinists, because when the Synod of Dort convened in 1618 to settle the
Calvinist-Arminian debates by offering an official response to the Hague Remonstrance,
Ames was appointed to serve ‘as a theological adviser to Johannes Bogerman, the
president of the Synod’ (Patterson 2000, 279) and ‘play[ed] an active role’ (A. Milton
2005, xxiv) in the proceedings. The outcome of the Synod was the condemnation of
Arminianism as heresy and the promulgation of the Canons of Dort, which established the
orthodox Calvinist position on the five points raised by the Hague Remonstrance. These
became known as the five points of Calvinism: ‘total depravity, unconditional election,
limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints’ (Palmer 2010, 10).
The Synod effected ‘a consolidation of Reformed orthodoxy,’ and Ames proceeded
to develop ‘the theological agenda for a “further Reformation”’ (Van Asselt 2001, 86). But
Ames’s fervent Calvinism was far from incompatible with the covenant theology he went
on to promulgate; indeed, the covenant of works ‘is everywhere presupposed in the Canons
of Dort’ (Horton 2006, 84). The title page of The Marrow of Sacred Divinity declared it ‘A
Worke usefull for this Season,’ and, tellingly, it was ‘published by order from the
Honorable the House of Commons.’ In the year of the outbreak of the English Civil War, a
theological tract which would shore up support for Calvinist opposition to high church
Anglicanism was timely indeed. Ames advocates a low church approach, writing in the
hope ‘that it may come to passe, that two, or three or so … may find something more fit to
instruct, and stir them up to piety, then they have observed in the more learned writings of
others; which conjecture if it doe not faile me, I shall think I have done a work worth the
party’ (S. M. Fallon 2012, 19). In this thesis, the term ‘Arminian’ will be used in its strictest sense to refer to
sympathy for the views of Arminius, not of Laud.
57
The Hague Remonstrance was written by followers of Jacobus Arminius and rejected Calvinist doctrine on
five major issues. The Remonstrants’ views on these points are summarised thus by David Weir:
1. Man is not totally depraved; he has some ability to choose God and His grace.
2. God elected man on the basis of his foreknowledge; he saw ahead of time that certain men would,
of their own free will, choose to repent and come to Christ for salvation.
3. The atonement of Christ was for all men, not just the elect. Christ’s blood was shed for all men,
and it was the responsibility of each man to use his or her free will to repent.
4. God’s grace is not irresistible: man, of his own free will, could choose to reject the gospel.
5. Some Arminians taught that a saint’s salvation was mutable; one could be redeemed and then,
somehow, fall from grace by an exceedingly wicked sin. This therefore gave Christians an impetus
to obey the law of god and to live morally upright lives, lest they fall into reprobation and the flames
of Hell. (1990, 20)
51
labour’ (1642, A5–A6).58 For Ames, ‘divinity is practicall, and not a speculative discipline’
(1642, 3), and his commitment to accessibility is evident in his inclusion of a glossary ‘for
the unlearned, whereby they may come to the understanding of this booke and others of the
same nature’ (1642, To the Reader). His aversion to speculation is common ground with
Milton, and their shared belief that ‘all things which are necessary to salvation are
contained in the Scriptures’ (Ames 1642, 169) is clear in Ames’s observation that
regarding ‘the place of Hell, and manner of torture & nature of outward things which
pertaine thereunto, because they are not necessary for us to know, the Scripture hath not
pronounced any thing distinctly of them’ (1642, 75), and Milton concurs ‘let us … follow
exclusively what the Bible teaches’ (CPW 6:213). But while the Christian Doctrine then
concludes that ‘it is absolutely clear from innumerable passages of scripture that there is in
reality one true and independent supreme God’ (CPW 6:213), The Marrow expounds
‘traditional Trinitarianism’ (Campbell et al. 2007a, 94) and embodies orthodox Calvinism
in its affirmation of all five points.59
For Ames, while the covenant of works was an ‘agreement involving two parties’
(D. N. J. Poole 1995, 205), the covenant of grace can only be unilateral, since postlapsarian
man’s total depravity leaves him unable to choose anything good. In the covenant of grace,
‘God onely doth covenant. For man being now dead in sinne, had no ability to contract a
spirituall covenant with God’ (Ames 1642, 114). But while Ames’s God appears to leave
little room for free will, some elements of human volition still creep in. This manifests the
essential duality of puritan theology:
as heir of the implicit … voluntarism inherent in Protestantism’s call for faith and
obedience as the believer’s response to God’s proclaimed Word, [puritan theology]
affirmed boldly the role of human responsibility and the element of contingency in
the divine-human relationship. And on the other hand, as heir of early
Protestantism’s somewhat more fully explicit emphasis upon God’s sovereignty in
relation to human affairs, it saw ultimate human destiny as divinely and
unconditionally determined by God’s eternal decree. (von Rohr 1986, 1)
58
We are reminded here of Herbert’s deathbed request that The Temple be published if ‘it may turn to the
advantage of any dejected poor Soul’ (Walton 1927, 314).
59
Ames subscribes to total depravity (1642, 68), unconditional election (28), limited atonement (114),
irresistible grace (127), and the perseverance of the saints (26).
52
Accordingly, the Marrow’s God is omnipotent, but not omnivolent: ‘by his Will he willeth
not all things he can will, but all things which he judgeth to be willed, and therefore
actually to be hereafter’ (Ames 1642, 34). While ‘predestination indeed was from eternity’
(Ames 1642, 116),60 God does not preordain every single event, but only wills the ends
that are necessary to his plan, leaving the exact means undetermined. Ames emphasises
that ‘it is so far off, that the will of God … doth urge all things with hard necessity,’ citing
the example of the soldiers at the Crucifixion: ‘it could not be as to the certainty of the
event, that the bones of Christ should be broken, because God would that they should not
be broken: yet there was no necessity imposed upon the Souldiers Speares’ (Ames 1642,
34). God allows this not from impotence, but kindness: He ‘useth meanes, not for want of
power, but through the abundance of his goodnesse: that namely he might communicate a
certain dignity of working to his Creatures also, & in them might make his efficiency more
perceivable’ (Ames 1642, 46). This narrows the gulf between man and God, and this
condescension serves two purposes. Firstly, it is necessitated by the disparity between
divine and mortal understanding: ‘many things are spoken of God according to the way of
our conceiving, rather then from his Nature’ (1642, 10).61 Arising from this is the second
purpose: accessible theology engenders spirituality, since ‘Man in this animall life doth
understand by sences, and so is as it were led by the hand from sensible things to
intelligible and spirituall,’ and therefore ‘the Scriptures doth not explaine the will of God
by universall, and scientificall rules, but by narrations, examples, precepts, exhortations,
admonitions, and promises: because that manner doth make most for the common use of
all kinde of men, and almost most to affect the will, & stirre up godly motions, which is the
chief scope of Divinity’ (Ames 1642, 54; 170). The need to couch theological concepts in
worldly terms underlies Ames’s persistent references to the price of redemption. Despite
prefacing his discussion of salvation by referencing 1 Peter 1:18-19,62 Ames nonetheless
60
Ames here follows Ephesians 1:4: ‘according as he hath chosen us in him, before the foundation of the
world, that wee should bee holy, and without blame before him in love.’
61
Raphael prefaces his account of the war in Heaven in a similar manner:
How shall I relate
To human sense th’ invisible exploits
Of warring Spirits …
What surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best. (PL 5.564-566; 571-574)
62
‘Yee were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and golde, from your vaine conversation
received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lambe without blemish
and without spot.’
53
conceptualises salvation in profane terms: ‘this transaction between God and Christ was a
certaine fore-going application of our redemption, and deliverance to our surety, and to us
in him’ (Ames 1642, 112).
While Ames used mercantile imagery to simplify the ways of God to men, the
distance between creator and creature was further narrowed by John Preston in the tenth
sermon of The New Covenant, or, The Saints Portion (1629), ‘one of the most important
writings on the covenant up to the time of the Westminster Assembly in 1643’ (Golding
2004, 51). The covenant was certainly important in Ames’s theology, but to Preston it was
‘one of the maine points in Divinity’ (1629, 71). In contrast to Ames, Preston’s covenant is
bilateral, being ‘a mutuall engagement’ between God and man (1629, 70). Man’s duties are
defined by Preston, as throughout covenant theology, in accordance with Genesis 17:1,
‘walke before mee, and be thou perfect’ (1629, 68). On the other side, God outlines the
various ways in which he willingly limits Himself through the agreement: ‘I am willing to
enter into Covenant with thee, that is, I will binde my selfe, I will ingage my selfe, I will
enter into bond, as it were, I will not be at liberty any more’ (Preston 1629, 70). Each
anaphora lashes God to man ever more tightly.
Just as the covenant is bilateral it is also twofold, divided into the covenant of
works and the covenant of grace: ‘the Covenant of workes runs in these terms, Doe this
and thou shalt live, and I will be thy GOD. This is the Covenant that was made with Adam,
and the Covenant that is expressed by Moses in the Morall Law, Doe this, and live’ (1629,
71). The covenant of works ‘presupposes a righteous and holy human servant entirely
capable of fulfilling [its] stipulations’ (Horton 2006, 83), which is inherently impossible
for postlapsarian man. The bilateralism of the ideal covenant relationship is diminished,
reducing dialogue to diktat: ‘this Covenant, brings only a servile feare, and an enmitie, for
when a man looks upon the Author of this Covenant, & he heares no more but the Law,
and what it requires; he looks upon God as a hard Master, as an enemy’ (Preston 1629, 72).
Ames’s ‘obedientall subjection’ seems far behind as man now ‘lookes upon [the covenant
of works] as a hard and cruell Law, as a heavy yoke, as an unsupportable bondage, and
therefore he hates it, and wishes there were no such law; he runs from it, as a Bond-slave
runnes from his master’ (Preston 1629, 72–73). But Preston is careful to emphasise that the
fault lies in man, not God: ‘the reason why this Law, or Covenant of workes is a
ministration of death, and of enmity, is not because there is any imperfection in the Law,
… but is from the weaknesse of the flesh, that is not able to keepe the Law’ (1629, 74).
54
Preston outlines the terms of the covenant of grace in distinction to that of works:
‘thou shalt beleeve, thou shalt take my Sonne for thy Lord, and thy Saviour, and thou shalt
likewise receive the gift of righteousnesse, which was wrought by him, for an absolution of
thy sinnes, for a reconciliation with me, then I will be thy God, and thou shalt be my
people’ 1629, 71–72). It is opposed to the covenant of works in every respect, being ‘a
ministration of love, not enmity; of freedome, not of bondage, … a ministration of life and
justification, and not a ministration of death and condemnation’ (1629, 74). Jesus’
intercession through the covenant of grace ‘shewes [man] a way of obtaining pardon and
remission for the sinnes that he hath committed against this Law’ (Preston 1629, 75), and
just as Ames’s covenant of grace was ‘a covenant of reconciliation between enemies’
(1642, 114), Preston’s covenant of grace transforms man’s relationship with God: ‘he
lookes not upon God now as a hard and cruell Master, but he lookes upon him now as a
God exceeding full of mercy and compassion’ (1629, 75). Jesus creates a bilateral
covenant on two levels, between himself and God and himself and man: he ‘hath
reconciled the disagreeing parties, he hath gone between them, as it were, and hath
undertaken for both sides; he hath undertaken on Gods part, these and these things shall be
done … he hath undertaken on our part, to give satisfaction by his death, and likewise to
make us obedient to his Father’ (Preston 1629, 84). Christ’s mediation heals the
disjunction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, and in the latter
Jesus ‘satisfied God’s justice and wrath, fulfilling the requirement of the broken covenant
of works’ (Jeon 2004, 36). Ames argues the
saving Covenant of God hath beene onely one from the beginning, yet the manner
of the application of Christ or of administring this new Covenant, hath not always
been one and the same, but divers, according to the ages in which the Church hath
been gathered … this manner of administring is double: one of Christ to be
exhibited, and the other of Christ exhibited. (1642, 193)
Similarly, Preston observes the ‘difference betweene the Testaments, [in that] the one was
expressed but in types and shaddowes, the other hath the substance it selfe’ (1629, 81).
This transition brings God into a tangible relationship with man; no more is he a tyrannical
‘hard Master,’ but Preston marvels that ‘I should enter into Covenant with the great GOD,
that hee should come to a Campact and agreement with mee, that he should tye himself,
55
and bind himselfe’ to man (1629, 85–6).63 But God’s bringing Himself closer to our level
simultaneously raises us nearer to His, as His willingness ‘to enter into Covenant …
implies a kinde of equality betweene us … then his strength is our strength, and his Armies
are our Armies, we have interest in all; there is an offensive and a defensive League; and
when we seeke to him, and put him in mind of it, he can not deny us’ (Preston 1629, 8586). The parallel between this bilateral agreement and its counterpart in the commercial
world is reinforced by the deluge of monetary imagery which follows: now that ‘this great
Mystery’ of the bilateral covenant has been ‘revealed, now these great riches are opened,
that before were hid’ (Preston 1629, 90). Preston reminds us that ‘it is better to be rich in
grace, better to have the priviledges of Jesus Christ, then to be rich in this world’ (1629,
90), and disabuses readers who value worldly riches above their spiritual counterparts: ‘the
Apostle exhorts rich men, that they change these other riches they enjoy, to spirituall
riches’ (1629, 90).64 But lest his readers mistake this for the usual puritan contemptus
mundi rhetoric, Preston shows his business acumen by emphasising that ‘a man will never
be exhorted to change, except it bee for the better’ (1629, 90). His readers can turn a
shrewd profit by exchanging material riches for spiritual, and so he urges ‘let them so use
their riches, so dispense them, so mannage them, that they may turne to other riches’
(Preston 1629, 90). While Preston’s final peroration is shot through with monetary
imagery, the metaphors of commercial life played an even greater role in the theology of
Thomas Hooker.
Like Ames, Hooker was a puritan in self-imposed exile in the Netherlands, and
Sargent Bush Jr. suggests that Ames’s ‘early work had helped form Hooker’s theology and
ecclesiology’ (Bush Jr. 2008). George Williams suggests that the two must have come into
contact at Christ’s College (1975, 2), and there was evidently lasting mutual respect
between the men: Ames declared ‘though he had been acquainted with many scholars of
divers nations, yet he never met with Mr. Hooker’s equal, either for preaching or
disputation’ (quoted in Williams 1975, 32), while Hooker wrote the preface to Ames’s
Fresh Suit Against Ceremonies (1633). Hooker is also directly linked to Misselden, as
from 1623 until 1633 the latter was ‘deputy governor of the Merchant Adventurers’
63
In his Treatise on the New Covenant (1632), Richard Harris asked ‘who gaines by the service you doe to
[God], he or you? All the commodity and benefit thereof is onely your[s]; having therefore the better end of
the staffe, hold him fast to his bargaine’ (39).
64
Preston goes on to note that ‘it is a true observation of one, when there were but wooden Chalices, then
there were golden Preists; and in after time when there were golden Chalices they had woodden Priests; so it
is, when the Church is in a lower condition, commonly it prospers best’ (1629, 92), and this image recurs in
Milton’s Of Reformation (CPW 1: 557), discussed in Chapter 3 below.
56
Company at Delft’ (Grassby 2008). Misselden was ‘a supporter of Anglican religion and a
known agent of Laud’ (Sprunger 1982, 237), but his attempts ‘to include the Church of
England’s liturgy and forms of prayer … in services’ (Ha 2011, 126) in the Merchant
Adventurers’ church met with considerable resistance. The Scottish minister in Delft, John
Forbes, ‘governed the church according to Presbyterian standards’ (Sprunger 1982, 237)
until the arrival of Hooker in the early 1630s. Hooker served as Forbes’s assistant from
1631-33, and this period saw a gradual movement ‘into freer, more congregational
directions’ (Sprunger 1982, 237) with Forbes and Hooker eventually ‘thr[owing] out
completely the Prayer Book and the authorised forms approved in England’ (Sprunger
1973, 40). This shift towards nonconformism was exacerbated, in Misselden’s eyes, by the
Delft church’s approval for the covenant theology which was sweeping English
congregations in the Netherlands in the early 1630s, and he dismissed this new interest in
the covenant as ‘presbyterian canons’ (quoted in Sprunger 1973, 41). Despite Misselden’s
conducting a ‘furious campaign to discredit Forbes and force his removal’ (Sprunger 1982,
241), the congregation and mercantile elders sided with Forbes and Hooker, voting
Misselden out as deputy governor in July 1633.
It is no coincidence that Hooker’s arrival in Delft coincided with a rapid increase of
the congregation’s interest in the covenant. Since the congregation was comprised largely
of merchants and their families, sermons in Delft would be most effective if formulated in
the language of commerce, and in this Hooker had considerable experience. The Faithful
Covenanter was published in 1644, although it was based on a sermon Hooker preached in
Dedham around 1629 (Parnham 2008, 922). Like the Marrow of Sacred Divinity, the
Faithful Covenanter’s title page declared the tract to be ‘very usefull in these times of
Covenanting with God,’ and Hooker indeed seems remarkably prescient. The tract opens
with an epigram from Deuteronomy 29:24-25,65 and Hooker goes on to draw the trusty
parallel between Israel and England: in response to the question, ‘what was this goodly
England, the onely Nation of all the Earth, and yet now all laid waste in this fearefull
manner?’ comes the response ‘what would have had the Lord done more, he gave them a
Law, and Mercies, and Judgements, but they would not serve the Lord, but brake the bands
asunder, and cast the cords behind their backs’ (1644, 3). Civil unrest is God’s punishment
for breaking the covenant, and the anticipation of the Civil War is acute: ‘if one should
hereafter passe by and see all the Townes burnt up here in this Land, … and the Churches
65
‘Even al nations shal say, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this
great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the Covenant of the Lord God of their fathers,
which he made with them when he brought them foorth out of the land of Egypt.’
57
burnt … would it not make our hearts ake Brethren’ (Hooker 1644, 4).66 But Hooker is no
Ozymandias, as he asks ‘was any nation greater then Babylon, or more glorious then
Jerusalem? But what is become of them brethren? Hath not the Lord brought desolation
and destruction upon them?’ (Hooker 1644, 10).67
For Hooker, the punishment is not unwarranted: ‘the Lord is just, for they have
forsaken the Covenant of the Lord their God’ (1644, 4). This is no abstract covenant, but a
bilateral agreement represented in worldly imagery. 68 Hooker anticipates his audience’s
anxious questions: ‘how shall we know God will performe his part, and how shall the Lord
know that we will performe our part to him, what Bond is there for it?’ (Hooker 1644, 19).
As Thomas Gataker observed in Christian Constancy Crowned by Christ (1624), the
advantage of bilateralism was the mutual benefit of adhering to the covenant. It was
unreasonable ‘to expect that [Jesus] should keepe covenants with us, when we have no care
to keepe the like with him,’ and so the simplest way to ensure Christ kept his end of the
bargain was for man to keep his own: ‘if we looke that [Christ] should keepe covenants
with us, let us be sure that we keepe covenant with him’ (1624, 8). A preacher addressing a
mercantile congregation would do well to vouch for God’s credit, and so Hooker reminds
us that ‘it is a sweet thing that the Lord hath bound himself by Oath to us … if you have an
honest and able man bound to you for a debt, you goe away content’ (1644, 22).
In an extended analogy, the covenant between man and God becomes a lease
established between tenant and landlord, since there are manifold parallels between
a Covenant that is made betweene two parties, and the Law, which is the Covenant
which is given us of the Lord: In a Covenant, first there must be conditions and
Articles of agreement betweene the parties offered and consented unto: and
secondly, a binding one another to the performance thereof by Bond, perhaps a
66
For a vivid discussion of the destruction of property in this period, see Stephen Porter, Destruction in the
English Civil Wars (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997).
67
We are reminded here of Shelley’s friend Horace Smith’s treatment of the subject:
Some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful, but unrecorded, race,
Once dwelt in that annihilated place. (1821, 213, ll.9–14)
68
In this, Hooker has an illustrious oratorical forebear: ‘our Saviour borroweth his comparison from easie
and familiar things, such as the Sower, the seed, the ground, the growth, the withering, the answering or
failing of the Sowers expectations … and by all these would teach us some spirituall instruction. For there is
no earthly thing, which is not fitted to put us in mind of some heavenly’ (T. Taylor 1621, 17).
58
paire of Indentures are drawne between them, wherein is declared, that they
mutually agree; he to make good the land and to pay thus much rent: the other to let
it him thus, and thus. (Hooker 1644, 18)69
Just as a lease begins with the tenant promising to pay the agreed amount of rent to the
landlord, so too in the covenant relationship ‘there must be answering of the means of
Grace, with the measure of our uprightnesse and obedience’ (1644, 17). Hooker reminds
his audience that they ‘know how Farmes and Leases goe, … he that hath a Lease of an
hundred pound a yeere, must not goe and pay but fiftie pound’ (1644, 17). God will not
‘lend his mercies for nothing,’ and if the congregation had been ‘those that creepe out once
in a moneth to a Sermon, there is a fiftie pound rent,’ but ‘the Lord will not take this of a
Dedham Christian … [who] sit at an hundred pound rent’ (Hooker 1644, 17). Hooker again
appeals to his congregation’s business sense: ‘if one owe you money, and take this day,
and that day, and promise it, and not pay it; you would not thinke well of this dealing’
(1644, 24), but this is exactly what they do when they ‘doe not walke with God’ (1644,
20). God ‘cals for … Good money: will he be payd with counters and shews? No, but
currant money of England’ (Hooker 1644, 25), and when man falls behind with his
spiritual rent payments, he is duly punished.70 Sinners ‘run in rerages with the Lord for his
rent’ (Hooker 1644, 30), and while they may think they escape, ‘God will have his rent one
way or other’ (1644, 31). God keeps diligent accounts, and he will ‘call for the Bookes,
69
The sacred and the profane overlapped in many contracts of the period. An ‘earnest,’ ‘a sum of money
given and received to secure the legal binding force of [a] contract’ (Kato 2011, 7), was commonly referred
to in early modern England as ‘God’s penny.’ It is unsurprising to see the ‘earnest’ invoked by other
contemporary covenant theologians, particularly Richard Sibbes. Sibbes maintained that ‘grace is the earnest
penny of glory: God hath made a covenant, and given earnest, he will not lose it, the earnest is never taken
away, but filled up’ (1637, 217), and that ‘the earnest of the Spirit of God, the first fruites, of peace, and joy,
of comfort and liberty, to the throne of grace, these are the beginnings of Heaven’ (1639, 571). In an
interesting Miltonic parallel, in Lydia’s Conversion (1638), Sibbes observes that ‘there is such a distance
betweene the nature, and corruption of man, and grace, that there must be a great deale of preparation, many
degrees to rise by before a man come to that condition hee should be in’ (Sibbes 1638, 21), just as man shall
not enter heaven ‘till by degrees of merit rais’d / They open to themselves at length the way / Up hither,
under long obedience tri’d’ (PL 7:157-159). Earnests are a common occurrence in Shakespeare’s plays, as in
Cymbeline, where the Queen gives Pisanio what she believes to be poison as ‘an earnest of a farther good /
that I mean to thee’ (1.6.74-5). For a discussion of Shakespeare’s dramatic use of earnests, see Patricia
Parker, ‘Temporal Gestation, Legal Contracts, and the Promissory Economies of The Winter’s Tale’, in
Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Andrew
R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 24-49.
70
In The Danger of Desertion (1641), a sermon preached immediately before his departure for New England
in 1633, Hooker lamented that ‘God is going, his glory is departing, England hath seene her best dayes, and
now evill dayes are befalling us: God is packing up his Gospell, because no body will buy his wares, nor
come to his price’ (1641, 15). While in The Faithful Covenanter he emphasised the high rent of Dedham
Christians compared to ‘those that crepe out once in a moneth to a Sermon,’ The Danger of Desertion makes
the local national, concluding that ‘the poore native Turks and Infidels shall have a cooler summer parlour in
hell then [the English]; for we stand at a high rate, we were highly exalted, therefore shall our torments be the
more to beare’ (Hooker 1641, 20).
59
and for Conscience, Gods Auditor, and the keeper of his accounts’ (1644, 35), drawing up
a spiritual ‘bill, … which if you cannot prove to be cancelled, woe be to you’ (1644, 29)
since God will ‘have the utmost farthing’ (1644, 37) on Judgement Day. Hooker concludes
by shifting the economic focus back to the spiritual realm, urging his congregation to
exercise the same caution in spiritual as business affairs:
amongst men, brethren, you would not have your credit cracked for anything; and
you doe honestly. A good name is a Jewell … O consider of this brethren; we have
hard bargains at the hands of the world, and of the devil, and sinne; many knocks of
soule, and girds of conscience with them: but the Lord hath beene ever gracious,
mercifull, loving, and kinde to us: resolve therefore that the Lord shall never lose
by you; let the world lose if it will; and let carnall friends, and sinne, and Satan lose
if they will: let not the Lord lose. (1644, 42–3)71
Misselden’s first published tract is little more than partisan bickering, and reading it we
share Milton’s exasperation when recounting of the battles of Saxon earls, which was no
different to ‘chronicl[ing] the Wars of Kites, or Crows, flocking and fighting in the Air’
(CPW 5:249). It is only in the Circle of Commerce that theory begins to be drawn from
practice, and Misselden declares the crucial importance of the balance of trade as if he had
done so all along. It now becomes apparent that trade is cyclical, not linear, and
concomitant with this is the awareness that investment must also be a circular process.
Mun’s England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade reformulates Misselden’s rudimentary
ideas with great sophistication, adding nuance to the zero-sum model and even anticipating
Adam Smith’s prioritisation of capital over money. Mun advocates a teleological view of
trade, always careful to consider ultimate profit before lamenting immediate loss.
Covenant theologians also reconceptualised loss as investment. The commercial
world so familiar to their congregations provided a ready source of rhetorical imagery, and
this was exploited by theologians of all persuasions. For Ames, total depravity necessitates
a unilateral covenant, but God’s lack of omnivolence and His condescension means that
The Marrow still gestures towards man’s free will. This bilateralism was made explicit in
Preston’s New Covenant, with Jesus brokering a deal in which each party in the covenant
agreement binds themselves to the other’s conditions. While the economic parallels of the
71
Hooker perhaps has in mind here Matthew 6:19-21: ‘lay not up for your selves treasure upon earth, where
moth and rust doth corrupt, & where theeves breake thorow, and steale. But lay up for your selves treasure in
heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, & where theeves doe not breake thorow, nor steale. For
where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
60
covenant relationship were not lost on Preston, they are fundamental to Hooker’s theology.
Hooker’s early career was spent – much to Misselden’s chagrin – preaching to merchants,
and his sermons are suffused with mercantile imagery. Playing on concepts of debt and
credit, he transforms the covenant into a tenancy agreement complete with rent
stipulations, penalties for late payments, and Jesus as guarantor. Hooker encouraged his
congregation to think of their salvation as the greatest transaction of all, and just as Mun
and Misselden reassured their readers that bullion exported to the East Indies would
eventually return with profit, so too covenant theologians argued that Jesus’ intercession
would recoup the spiritual investment thought lost in the Fall.
61
Chapter 2
‘Is the ballance thine?’: Jonson, Herbert, and the Capitulation to Commodification
In the good old days of trade, in which our Forefathers plodded on, and got estates
too, there were no bubbles.
– Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1841, 18:156)
J. D. Gould has observed that the economic depression that afflicted England during the
early 1620s was ‘one of the most widely discussed topics of the day’ and ‘gave rise to
much official enquiry and unofficial documentary discussion’ (1955b, 121). The debate
over the causes and remedies of the depression brought the wider ethical issues
surrounding consumption and commodification to the forefront of cultural consciousness,
and these concepts were investigated as much in literary works as in economic tracts. Ben
Jonson’s The Staple of Newes (1626) explores the commodification of both money and
information, concluding that to treat these concepts as commodities is not only unethical,
but problematises representations of truth. In The Temple (1633), George Herbert gradually
comes to understand salvation as a bargain struck with God, and so the commodification of
the soul is crucial to his conceptualisation of redemption. While Jonson and Herbert have
opposing attitudes regarding the consequences of commodification, they both prove to be
crucial precedents for Milton’s exploration of the relationship between commodification,
sin, and salvation.
During the spring of 1626, Milton briefly returned home from his studies in
Cambridge for several weeks.72 The First Elegy recounts Milton’s activities during this
period in London: like many seventeen-year-old boys, a portion of his time was devoted to
72
The exact reason for Milton’s absence from Cambridge is unclear. Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns
recently followed John Carey in thinking that Milton was at home simply due to the ‘university vacation’
(2010, 32), but cite no supporting evidence. Campbell and Norman Postlethwaite earlier mentioned the
Cambridge tutor, ‘William Chappell, who had recently rusticated Milton’ (2007, 78), and this position is
supported by both Barbara Lewalski’s claim that Milton ‘had a serious altercation with his tutor Chappell
which resulted in a brief rustication at home’ (2003, 21) and the First Elegy’s references to ‘the reproofs of a
harsh tutor’ (l.16) and ‘this rustication of mine’ (l.19). Despite this, no conclusive evidence for Milton’s
rustication in spring 1626 has been discovered. Gordon Campbell has kindly pointed out to me that in 1626
the Cambridge Lent term ended on 31 March while Lent ended on 6 April, so even if Milton had not been
rusticated there was still a week after the end of the Lent term where he could have been in London to see the
Staple of Newes.
62
watching girls (l.53), but he also spent time ‘beneath [his] father’s roof’ (l.11) absorbed in
the
Books
That are my life and absorb me altogether.
When I weary of these and need a change, I have the theatre
To call me from my study and offer diversion. (ll.25–8)
Gordon Campbell doubts whether Milton actually visited the theatre during this period,
explaining that, because ‘Greek and Roman plays were not performed in Caroline
London,’ the classical dramatic types Milton refers to in the elegy ‘must be referring to
plays that he had been reading’ (1999, 103). But the First Elegy explicitly describes the
theatre as a ‘change,’ an alternative to books, which suggests that Milton had indeed seen
plays performed. Milton most likely visited Blackfriars, as his father was a trustee and the
theatre was ‘well within walking distance’ (Burbery 2007, 1) of the family home in Bread
Street. 73 Moreover, Milton describes reading and the theatre as ‘indoor’ pleasures (l.49),
and the Blackfriars was one of the few indoor theatres in London. Timothy J. Burbery also
suggests that sinuosi pompa theatre, ‘the winding theatre’s parade,’ alludes to ‘the curve of
the Blackfriars’ auditorium’ (2007, 9). This seems rather tenuous, however, as Milton’s
familiarity with the Blackfriars interior does not necessarily mean that he saw a play there;
it would surely be possible for the son of a trustee to visit the theatre between public
performances.
But Burbery adduces further evidence to suggest that Milton did see a play at
Blackfriars during his time in London: The Staple of Newes. Milton was home from
Cambridge during the Lent term, which ran from 13 January to 31 March (Burbery 2007,
10), and The Staple of Newes repeatedly refers to ‘the time of year, in Lent’ (Int.2.63).74
The play was performed at Court during Shrovetide (Jonson 1954, 251), and it is ‘likely
that it was presented in the public theatre at Candlemas [between 28 January and 3
February]’ (Kifer 1972, 337) and ‘shown at least several times throughout Spring 1626,
from late February until early April’ (Burbery 2007, 11). It seems more likely that Milton
saw The Staple of Newes at Blackfriars when we consider the dramatic characters
73
For an account of John Milton senior’s trusteeship of the Blackfriars theatre, see Herbert Berry, ‘The
Miltons and the Blackfriars Playhouse,’ Modern Philology 89, 4 (1992), 510–514, and Gordon Campbell,
‘Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton,’ Milton Quarterly 33, 4 (1999), 95–105.
74
There are further references to Shrovetide at Induction.11-12, 62-65; Intermean 2.63; 3.2.82-5; 5.5.35. For
a reading of the play as a Shrovetide festive comedy, see Devra Rowland Kifer, ‘The Staple of News:
Jonson’s Festive Comedy,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12, 2 (1972), 329–344.
63
described in the First Elegy. Milton arrays a collection of characters which, as Campbell
notes, are stock characters from classical drama. But it is also plausible that Milton was
describing characters from a contemporary play influenced by classical forms. Jonson’s
characteristic classicism is manifest in The Staple of Newes, and the first five characters
described in the First Elegy have counterparts in Jonson’s play (Burbery 2007, 12).
Burbery translates catus senior as ‘crafty old man,’ which aptly describes Peniboy
Canter, an ‘old man’ (5.1.101) who fakes his own death then disguises himself as a beggar
to observe his son squander the inheritance. However, David R. Slavitt’s 2011 translation
of the First Elegy translates catus senior as ‘grasping old man’ (l.29) which could equally
describe Peniboy Senior, the uncle who is so miserly that he sells the food sent to him and
‘preserves himselfe, / Like an old hoary Rat, with mouldy pye-crust’ (2.1.17-18). The
prodigus hæres, or prodigal heir, represents Peniboy Junior, who spends much of the play
wasting his father’s money until Canter reveals himself and denounces his son as ‘thou,
Prodigall’ (4.4.127). Procus, or suitor, refers to many characters, as the play’s action
revolves around various attempts to woo Lady Pecunia, an allegorical embodiment of
money to whom ‘all the world are suiters’ (1.6.65).75 Burbery contests the usual literal
translation of positâ casside miles adest as a soldier that has set aside his helmet, arguing
instead for a figurative reading as ‘one who has set aside, or foregone, warfare itself’
(2007, 13). This describes The Staple’s Shunfield, a former ‘Sea-Captaine’ (2.4.7) who
threatens to beat Peniboy Senior only for the latter to reply ‘True, Captaine, if you durst
beat any other, / I should believe you’ (2.4.114-115). The ‘lawyer … who babbles in
wretched Latin’ (ll.31-2) represents Picklock, a lawyer who boasts of his ability to cant ‘in
all the languages in Westminster-Hall’ (4.4.103). Finally, the ‘innocent maiden, wide-eyed
with wonder / At the first pangs of a love that has taken her unawares’ (ll.36-7) suggests
the first meeting between Pecunia and Peniboy Junior, where Pecunia claims ‘I felt my
heart beat, as it would leape out, / In speach; and all my face it was a flame, / But how it
came to passe I doe not know’ (2.5.55-7).
There is one final parallel between the First Elegy and The Staple of Newes, which
Burbery overlooks: Milton’s description of ‘ladies of fashion who gathered together / to
see and be seen on Pompey’s porch near the Roman theatres’ (ll.66-67) mirrors the
Gossips who interrupt Jonson’s Induction claiming that they are ‘women of fashion; [who]
75
In the preface to his Lady Pecunia (1605), Richard Barnfield describes Pecunia as being ‘lov’d of men’ (3,
cited in Stonex 1915, 825).
64
come to see, and to / be seene’ (Ind.9-10). It seems likely, then, that Milton saw The Staple
of Newes performed at Blackfriars.
In the past, criticism of the Staple has tended to disregard the main plot of Pecunia
and the Peniboys as tiresomely allegorical, clumsy, and ill-defined (Thorndike 1929;
Palmer 1967), and the livelier sub-plot satirising the new office has attracted more
attention for what it reveals about the nascent English news trade (Muggli 1992; Levy
1999; Nevitt 2005; L. Davis, Smith, and Walker 2006). A decade ago, critics began to
recognise the importance of currency and circulation in the play (Wayne 1999; Harp 2000),
but it is only within the past five years that this approach has been broadened to read the
play ‘in relation to economic thought emerging in … the 1620s’ (Deng 2008, 246),
interpreting the courtship of Pecunia as a ‘meditation on the affect and ethics of capital’
(Loewenstein 2008, 336). However, Joseph Loewenstein has somewhat oversimplified
Jonson’s attitude to monopolies, as I will show in my discussion of the Staple’s project to
issue news ‘under the Seale of the Office, / As Staple Newes; no other news be currant’
(1.2.35-6). Stephen Deng offers an insightful reading of The Staple’s didacticism in light of
Thomas Mun’s advocacy of the Aristotelian golden mean, but he neglects to discuss one of
the primary pamphlet controversies of the early 1620s in which ethics overlapped
economics, and which was most germane to the Milton family: the debate over usury.
Usury was central to the disputes regarding the causes of the depression, as the rate
of interest on usury was limited to ten percent in England as opposed to eight or six percent
in most other European countries. Many English merchants argued that this made England
less competitive compared to her European rivals, and the rate of usury was lowered to
eight percent in 1624. One tract which was influential in the decision to lower the rate of
usury (Parr 1999, 2.1.4 n.4) was Thomas Culpeper’s A Tract Against Usurie (1621).
Despite the title, Culpeper does not argue against usury itself, but only against its high rate
of interest. He recognises that usury was central to economic life, as its rate ‘is the measure
by which all men trade, purchase, build, plant, or any other waies bargaine’ (Culpeper
1621, 4). Every interaction between the characters in The Staple falls under one of these
categories, suggesting that the play may be read as a microcosm of English economic
interactions. Culpeper believed the higher rate of English usury put the nation at a
disadvantage with ‘our industrious neighbours the Dutch’ (1621, 3), whose rate was six per
cent. Even though the Dutch had ‘no other advantages of industry and frugality,’ they
would nonetheless out-trade the English, as ‘if they make returne of tenne per centum, they
65
almost double the Use allowed, and so make a very gainefull trade’ (Culpeper 1621, 2).
The high rate of usury actually led to a national regression, as
it makes the Land it selfe of small value, neerer the rate of new-found Lands, than
of any other Countrie where Lawes, government, and peace, have so long
flourished; For the high rate of Usury makes Land sell so cheape; and the cheape
sale of Land is the cause men seeke no more by industry and cost to improve them.
(Culpeper 1621, 5)
Culpeper held that with careful husbandry, the yields of English lands could be improved
greatly and ‘the riches and commodities of this Land would neere be doubled,’ but low
land values made it not worthwhile to have ‘the barren Lands mended by Marle, Sleech,
Lime, Chalke, Sea-sand, and other meanes’ (1621, 6). This indifference to cultivation is
expressed by characters in The Staple:
Fit[ton]: Who would hold any Land
To have the trouble to marle it? Shu[nfield]: Not a gentleman.
Bro[ker]: Let clownes and hyndes affect it, that love ploughes,
And carts, and harrowes, and are busie still,
In vexing the dull element. (2.4.152-156)
In the Netherlands, conversely, ‘lands [are] deere, and money cheape; and consequently
the improvement of their Lands at so great a charge with them, is gainefull to the owners,’
and so the Dutch ‘draine and maintaine their Lands against the sea which floweth higher
above them, then it doth above the lowest parts of our drownd lands’ (Culpeper 1621, 6).76
But Culpeper does not propose that the limit on usury be abolished, as he
anticipates the objection that there was no such limit during the reign of Henry VIII: ‘to
this, may bee answered, that in those times there was a stricter band in that point upon
mens consciences; So far forth as Usurers were in the same case as excommunicate
persons, they could make no wills, nor were allowed Christian burial’ (1621, 9). The
76
The sea also ‘floweth high’ above the Dutch in The Staple, as one of the stories from the news office
claims that
One Cornelius-Son,
Hath made the Hollanders an invisible Eele,
To swimme the Haven at Dunkirke, and sinke all
The shipping there. (3.2.75-78)
66
absence of such religious strictures leads to moral dissipation, as Culpeper ‘fear[s]
fornication is too frequent among us’ (1621, 9). The relationship between money and
fornication recurs in the Staple, as when Pecunia leaves Peniboy Senior to cavort with
Peniboy Junior in a tavern, the miser exclaims ‘Pecunia is a whore’ (4.3.82), as just as
Peniboy Canter chastises his son for ‘prostitut[ing]’ Pecunia (4.4.130).
The ethical issues touched on by Culpeper evoke the patristic precedent for
opposing usury. The acquisition of useful commodities was one of the goals of trade, but
when money began to be treated not as a means to commodities, but a commodity in itself,
many had an Augustinian anxiety regarding the confusion of means and ends:
There are some things which are to be enjoyed, some which are to be used … those
which are to be enjoyed make us happy; those which are to be used assist us and
give us a boost, so to speak, as we press on towards our happiness, so that we may
reach and hold fast to the things which make us happy. And we, placed as we are
among things of both kinds, both enjoy and use them; but if we choose to enjoy
things that are to be used, our advance is impeded and sometimes even diverted,
and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are to be
enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things. (St. Augustine
1997, 9)
The anonymous tract Usurie Araigned and Condemned (1625) opposes usury on such
religious grounds, as ‘the wrongs that Usurers doe to God and themselves passe all
comprehension’ (24). Usury is a tool of Satan, and the author asks
can the grand enemie erect up any yoke-fellow to match with Idolatrie, but only
Usurie[?] Doth not Idolatrie conspire against a Church that it may spoile that
Common-wealth[?] And doth not Usurie on the other side conspire by many subtill
practices, to impoverish Common-wealths, thereby at ease to spoile those
Churches. (Usurie Araigned 1625, 14)
This connection between usury and idolatry is made in the Staple, when Peniboy Senior
addresses ‘my Goddesse, bright Pecunia’ (2.1.3), recalling Volpone’s ‘open the shrine, that
I may see my Saint’ (1.1.2).
As usury distorts man’s relationship with God, so too it perverts familial inheritance:
67
so long as the Civill Law did censure Usurie, how lineably did Lands descend with
little alteration through many generations, but since Usurie found favour under that
shadow of a limitation, how hath it put men on to live beyond their limits in their
diet and apparel, vaine buildings and superfluous attendance, whereby most houses
have since expulsed their Owners. (Usurie Araigned 1625, 4)
In the Staple, however, the reverse is the case. The usurer, Peniboy Senior, despite being
an ‘abstemious, childless killjoy’ (Kifer 1972, 340), lives very much within his limits, with
a modest diet and two occasional servants, both of whom he chides for their extravagance.
By contrast, Peniboy Junior, when his estate descends ‘lineably’ from his father, buys new
boots, clothes, a girdle, ruff, hat, and spurs (1.3.36), lays on a ‘good dinner’ (4.1.2) in a
tavern for eleven other characters, and proposes building a ‘Canters Colledge’ (4.4.82)
which he will ‘endow with lands, and meanes’ (4.4.86), before Peniboy Canter throws off
his disguise and expels his son from his house by pledging to ‘take home the Lady
[Pecunia], to my charge, / And these her servants, and leave you my Cloak, / To travel in
to Beggers Bush!’ (4.4.121-123). Usurie Araigned condemns those who borrow from
usurers for their ‘extreme waste of forraine Commodities, that many of these wasters can
eate, drink, & weare little but outlandish, to the empoverishing of their owne Countrie, and
enriching forraine Nations’ (1625, 8), and Peniboy Junior indeed appears to spend his
inheritance on domestic items:
P[eniboy] Ju[nior]: I pray thee tell me, Fashioner, what Authors
Thou read’st to helpe thy invention? Italian prints?
Or Arras hangings? They are Taylors Libraries.
Fas[hioner]: I scorne such helps. P[eniboy] Ju[nior]: O, though thou art a silkworme,
And deal’st in sattins and velvets, and rich plushes,
Thou canst not spin all forms out of thy selfe…
Fas[hioner]: Believe it Sir. (1.2.101-106; 108)
Peniboy Junior’s relations with the fashioners of the Staple news office, however, are quite
different. There, he has a hunger only for outlandish news, spending a great deal to hear
‘foreign fables’ (Rockwood 2008, 137). But nonetheless, Usurie Araigned finds spendthrift
children serve a didactic purpose: ‘children with much outrage, and many mischiefs to
68
their Countrie, do commonly spend all, remaining to us as spectacles, through which we
may discerne the bad use, and bad end of goods gotten by these bad meanes’ (Usurie
Araigned 1625, 14), and this is indeed the purpose Peniboy Junior serves in the Staple.
But while critics usually consider Pennyboy Junior to be the central character of the
play, the key protagonist is in fact Pecunia. She drives the dramatic action: Peniboy Junior
inherits her in the protasis, Peniboy Senior’s struggle to retain her forms the epitasis, and
Peniboy Canter reclaims her in the catastrophe. Her tripartite characterisation as a goddess,
a representation of money, and a real woman, mirrors the three interrelated approaches
taken to the issue of usury: Usurie Araigned’s fear of usurious idolatry, Culpeper’s
mercantile position regarding the economic benefits of a lower rate of usury, and Culpeper
and Usurie Araigned’s moral concern about the connections between usury, fornication,
and the prostitution of money.
Pecunia’s role as a goddess is clear from her first appearance, where Peniboy
Senior’s address ‘is full of religious vehicles’ (Partridge 1958, 181). His addressing her as
‘Your Grace’ (2.1.1; 4; 6; 11; 20) could be read as deference to a social superior, an
interpretation supported by his desire that she ‘teach this body, / To bend, and these my
aged knees to buckle’ (2.1.6-7). But it becomes clear that the abasement is not social but
spiritual, as he declares ‘I’m your Martyr’ (2.1.10) and that
All this Nether-world
Is yours, you command it, and doe sway it,
The honour of it, and the honesty,
The reputation, I, and the religion…
Is Queene Pecunia’s (2.1.38-41; 43)77
Pecunia questions the ‘self-punitive aspect of his sexual and financial obsession’ (Sanders
1998a, 194), rejecting Peniboy Senior’s pious prostration:
Pec[unia]: Why do you so, my Guardian? I not bid you,
Cannot my Grace be gotten, and held too,
Without your selfe-tormentings, and your watches,
Your macerating of your body thus
77
Devra Kifer Rowland claims that The Staple is ‘a morality account of the salvation of Pennyboy Junior’
(1972, 329), but Penniboy Senior’s character arc is more aptly described in such religious terms. He moves
from outright idolatry of Pecunia at the beginning of the play, to happily surrendering Pecunia to his nephew
at the close.
69
With cares, and scantings of your dyet, and rest? (2.1.21-25)
This foreshadows Comus’ speech against temperance:
If all the world
Should in a pet of temperance feed on Pulse,
Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but Frieze,
Th’all-giver would be unthank’t, would be unprais’d,
Not half his riches known, and yet despis’d,
And we should serve him as a grudging master
As a penurious niggard of his wealth. (ll.721-726)78
Pecunia persistently derides Peniboy Senior as a ‘penurious niggard of his wealth,’ leading
him to attempt to reclaim her: ‘I am still awake, / To waite upon your Grace, please you to
quit / This strange company, they are not for you’ (4.3.14-16). When Pecunia responds ‘No
Guardian, I doe like them very well’ (4.3.15-17), Peniboy Senior plunges from the sacred
to the profane, disparaging Pecunia and her entourage as ‘you whores, / My bawds, my
instruments, what should I call you, / Man may thinke base inough for you?’ (4.2.58-9).
Jonson plays on the mineralogical and social meanings of ‘base’ in his description
of Pecunia’s ancestry, which is a mixture of base and precious. Her lineage descends
through ‘the mynes o’ Hungary …. [and] the Welsh-myne’ (4.4.22-3), regions known for
their production of base metals like lead, copper, and iron. But she also has roots in ‘the
Spanish mynes o’the West-Indies’ (4.4.21), famed for their silver, and her grandfather was
‘cousin to the King of Ophyr’ (1.4.43).79 The Spanish connection has contemporary
relevance, as Jonson names Pecunia ‘Aurelia Clara Pecunia’ (1.6.46) and titles her
‘Infanta of the Mines’ (1.6.42), alluding to the Spanish Infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia,
whose potential marriage to Charles had foundered shortly before the play’s performance.
The English failure to gain legal entrance to the Spanish royal family is referenced in
78
In The History of Britain, Milton compares the ancient Britons to the ‘wild Irish’ who ‘run into Bogs … up
to the Neck, and there … stay many daies holding a certain morsel in thir mouths no bigger then a bean, to
suffice hunger,’ although he regretfully notes ‘that receipt, and the temperance it taught, is long since
unknown among us’ (CPW 5.1:59).
79
Ophir’s wealth was legendary and the region supplied Solomon with ‘gold[,] foure hundred and twentie
talents’ (1 Kings 9:28).
70
Pecunia’s ‘contracted family’ (1.4.48), which we first understand as ‘close,’ but then
realise Jonson is also playing on the legal sense:80
Pic[klock]: Her Secretary --P[eniboy] Ca[nter]: Who is her Gentleman-usher too. Pic[klock]: One Broker,
And then two Gentlewomen; Mistresse Statute,
And Mistresse Band, with Waxe the Chambermaide,
And Mother Mortgage, the old Nurse. (1.6.48-52)
This connection drawn between money and ‘Mistresse Statute’ is exploited by Peniboy
Senior in his mentions of the new usury legislation, as when he reassures Pecunia that
‘although your Grace be falne of, two I’the hundred, / In vulgar estimation; yet am I, /
Your Graces servant still’ (2.1.4-6). He takes the moral argument from Usurie Araigned
and adapts it to criticise not usury itself, but its new lower rate: at the old rate ‘th’age was
thrifty, / And men good husbands, look’d unto their stockes, / Had their minds bounded’
(3.4.35-7), just as Usurie Araigned asks if in the absence of usury, ‘thriftie men… (their
Talents increasing by Gods gifts and their honest endevours) [would] make therewith all
the more imployment of their Children, Servants, and poore Neighbours in the same kinde
of industrie, be it by Sea or Land, to the infinite increase of all kind of wealth?’ (1625, 14).
Instead, they ‘give over and spend all in Idleness’ (14), and so too Peniboy Senior claims
that due to the lower rate of usury
Now the publike Riot
Prostitutes all, scatters away in coaches,
In foot-mens coates, and waiting womens gownes,
They must have velvet hanches. (3.4.37-40)
He then begins a tirade against those who ‘covet things / Superfluous still’ (3.4.50-51),
asking
What need hath Nature
Of silver dishes? Or gold chamber-pots?
Of perfum’d napkins? Or a numerous family,
To see her eate? Poore, and wise she, requires
80
For a recent examination of Jonson’s use of legal processes in his plays, see Lisa Klotz, ‘Ben Jonson’s
Legal Imagination in Volpone,’ Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 51, 2 (2011), 385–408.
71
Meate only; Hunger is not ambitious. (3.4.52-56)81
This is a clear influence on the Lady’s speech in favour of temperance in Comus:
Do not charge most innocent nature,
As if she would her children should be riotous
With her abundance, she good cateress
Means her provision onely to the good
That live according to her sober laws,
And holy dictate of spare Temperance. (ll.762-767)
However, there is one crucial difference between the speeches: the Lady believes that ‘If
every just man that now pines with want / Had but a moderate and beseeming share … /
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc’t’ (ll.768-9; 772), while Peniboy Senior
extends the argument against superfluity to propose that ‘it were much more honour / [To]
want necessary’ (3.4.51-2). Peniboy Senior’s greed ‘manifests itself largely as a refusal to
eat’ (Boehrer 1997, 139), and so he believes ‘every just man … pin[ing] with want’ is not
the problem, but the solution.
Peniboy Senior’s fear of the ‘publike Riot’ underlies his jealous possession of
Pecunia, keeping her ‘smother’d … in a chest, / and strangl’d … in leather’ (4.3.41-2).
Even Mortgage, Bande, and Statute express anxiety about Pecunia’s free circulation:
Mor[tgage]: Please your Grace to retire. Band[de] I feare your Grace
Hath ta’ne too much of the sharpe ayre. Pec[unia] O no!
I could endure to take a great deale more …
What thinke you of it, Statute?
Sta[tute]: A little now and then does well, and keeps
Your Grace in your complexion. Ban[de]: And true temper.
Mor[tgate]: But too much Madame, may encrease cold rheumes,
Nourish catarrhes, greene sicknesses, and agues,
And put you in consumption. (2.1.45-54)
81
Utopia’s ‘gold chamber-pots’ resonated throughout the seventeenth century, reappearing again in
Winstanley’s Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), discussed in Chapter 4.
72
It is unsurprising that Peniboy Senior suggests ‘best to take / Advice of your grave women,
Noble Madame, / They know the state o’ your body, and ha’ studied / Your Graces health’
(2.1.54-56).
While Pecunia represents both a goddess and money for Peniboy Senior, for his
nephew she represents a tangible woman. Peniboy Junior praises her with Petrarchan
references: ‘her smiles they are Love’s fetters! / Her brests his apples! Her teats
Strawberries!’ (4.2.53-55),82 which seems to support Joseph Loewenstein’s reference to the
‘courtship’ of Pecunia (2008, 348). But no such courtship takes place. Pecunia becomes
Peniboy Junior’s inherited property, and he treats her as such. She is emphatically not his
Petrarchan mistress, as she is both subservient and sexually available:
P[eniboy] Ju[nior]: Kisse him, sweet Princesse, and stile him a Cousin. [She
kisseth]
Pec[unia]: I will, if you will have it. Cousin Pyed-mantle. (4.4.32-3)
Pecunia acts haughtily with Peniboy Senior because he has gained her by the unethical
means of usury, rather than the ‘lineable’ descent of estate. The Petrarchan itemisation of
Pecunia’s body enacted by Peniboy Junior, Fitton, and Almanac is an expression of
communal sexual ownership.83 Foreshadowing Comus, the female body is here
‘deconstructed and re-membered by the power of the male wit as a commodified and
fetishized object’ (Sanders 1998a, 195), by which ‘the woman became arrayed as an object
of consumption for other men, flaunted before an audience as something not only there to
be looked upon, but eaten’ (Sawday 1995, 199, quoted in Sanders 1998a, 195).
Peniboy Senior’s desire to maintain his exclusive ownership of Pecunia is mirrored
in the Staple news office, ‘an emporium of newsmongers bent on achieving a monopoly
over the distribution of fresh intelligence’ (Sherman 2001, 24). That Jonson intends the
news office to be read as an information monopoly is clear from its name, as ‘a staple was
a place appointed by royal authority where a body of merchants had an exclusive right for
purchasing certain export goods’ (Kitch 2009, 176). The decision to satirise a news
monopoly is not arbitrary either, as ‘the crown intervened frequently in the operations of
the print industry, tending to grant patents, for certain classes of publication, to the
82
Petrarchan imagery may be considered another instance of the meaningless jargon which so exasperates
Peniboy Canter at 4.4.16-74.
83
C. G. Thayer’s claim that Pecunia is ‘implicitly described as a whore’ (1966, 196) overlooks Peniboy
Senior’s not so implicit description: ‘Pecunia is a whore’ (4.3.82).
73
monarch’s favourites’ (Sanders 1998b, 129). But Sanders’s reading of the play as a satire
on early modern print culture is erroneous, because the master of the Staple office,
Cymbal, ‘prides himself on the fact that his is a market for handwritten news’
(Loewenstein 2008, 336), explaining that ‘when Newes is printed, / It leaves Sir to be
Newes’ (1.5.48-49).84
The Staple is evidently a modern undertaking, as it has a strictly regimented
division of labour:
Cym[bal]: This is the outer roome, where my Clerkes sit,
And keepe their sides, the Register I’the midst,
The Examiner, he sits private there, within,
And here I have my severall Rowles, and Fyles
Of Newes by the Alphabet, and all put up
Under their heads. (1.5.2-7)
The importance of division of labour did not become widely recognised in England until
later in the seventeenth century, when William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690), written
in the 1670s, attributed the efficiency of Dutch shipyards to their strictly regimented
division of labour. The nautical connection is reinforced by Pecunia’s ability to attract
ships:
P[eniboy] Ju[nior]: O, how my Princesse draws me, with her looks,
And hales me in, as eddies draw in boats,
Or strong Charybdis ships, that saile too neere
The shelves of Love! (4.2.42-45)
The Staple is indeed drawn to Pecunia, but through her guardian, Peniboy Senior. Cymbal
begins ‘you have a Lady, / That sojournes with you … whom I would draw / Oftner to a
84
In Jonson’s News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620), a Factor disputes with a Printer
about whether news should be printed or handwritten, telling him ‘it is the printing I am offended at, I would
have no news printed; for when they are written, though they be false, they remain news still’ (1.1.53-55).
Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian canon lawyer, historian, and intelligencer, stressed that news was best published
quickly, because ‘while the events are recent, curiosity excites everyone to read about them, [but] a few days
later no one bothers’ (Sarpe 1969, 1178, quoted in De Vivo 2005, 48). Indeed, although ‘Venice pioneered
the regular exchange of manuscript news, no information press was established there before the late decades
of the seventeenth century’ (De Vivo 2005, 48). The speed with which handwritten news could get out into
the streets and surreptitiously circulate also made it much more difficult to censor than its printed counterpart
(Infelise 2002, 227).
74
poore Office’ (3.4.20-1; 23-4),85 but Peniboy Senior responds as if sceptical of investing in
a trade voyage:
How come [the profits] in?
Is it a certaine businesse, or a casuall?
For I am loth to seeke out doubtfull courses,
Runne any hazardous paths, I love straight waies. (3.4.29-32)
When Cymbal is unable to offer any assurance, Peniboy Senior responds ‘I’ll ha’ no venter
in your Ship, the Office, / Your Barke of Six, if ‘twere sixteen, good Sir’ (3.4.79-80).
The news office does, however, take measures to ensure it is a ‘certaine businesse.’
In the Staple, ‘communication is conceptualised as a commodity’ (L. Davis, Smith, and
Walker 2006, 8), and so news is collected from ‘all the Shires o’the kingdome’ (1.5.21)
and throughout Europe, sorted, and stockpiled in the Staple office.86 The Staple’s purpose
is ‘to enter all the Newes … o’ the time… and vent it as occasion serves’ (1.1.26-7), and
the importance of ‘occasion’ is clear when a woman asks for ‘a groatsworth of any Newes’
(1.4.11). The Register tells her it will be forthcoming, only to be chided by the Clerk:
You’ll blast the reputation of the Office,
Now I’the Bud, if you dispatch these Groats,
So soone: let them attend in the name of policie. (1.4.18-20)
Its stories are ‘both infinitely desirable and infinitely fictional’ (Penuel 2009, 141),
sensationalist fabrications which exploit the fears and prejudices of the readers: the ‘King
of Spaine is chosen Pope’ (3.2.20), the Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola has ‘a new
Project : to bring an army over in corke-shooes, / And land them, here, at Harwich’
(3.2.87-89), and the Rosicrucians have perfected ‘the art of drawing farts out of dead
bodies … as there is no Princesse, / But may perfume her chamber with th’extraction’
(3.2.98; 101-2). The Staple ‘makes conversation itself a primarily commercial interchange’
(Loxley 2002, 92) by peddling gossip, evoking Samuel Butler’s description of a ‘NewsMonger’ as a ‘Retailer of Rumour, that takes up upon Trust, and sells as cheap as he buys.
He deals in a perishable Commodity, that will not keep: for if it be not fresh it lies upon his
85
Cymbal continues the earlier sexualisation of Pecunia: ‘office’ commonly punned on ‘orifice,’ as when
Iago tells Rodorigo ‘it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets / [Othello] has done my office’ (2.1.376-377).
86
Until 1641 there were restrictions on domestic reportage, which reduced domestic news to spurious tales of
possessions, monstrous births, and the like.
75
Hands, and will yield nothing. True or false is all one to him; for Novelty being the Grace
of bothe, a Truth grows stale as soon as a Lye’ (Butler 2011, 126). This is evident when
Shunfield exclaims ‘you must get o’ this newes, to store your Office, / Who dines and sups
i’ the towne? Where, and with whom?’ (3.3.46-47), reminding us of Rochester’s A Ramble
in St. James’s Park, which takes place when ‘much Wine had past with grave discourse /
Of who Fucks who, and who does worse’ (1999, 76 ll.1–2). Jonson believes the appetite
for gossip masquerading as news is absurd, and he ‘rais[ed] this ridiculous Office of the
Staple, wherin the age may see her owne folly, or hunger and thirst after publish’t
pamphlets of Newes, set out every Saturday, but made all at home, & no syllable of truth in
them’ (To the Readers 11-15).
After playing in a central role in Act Three, the Staple is left quietly behind, and the
Gossips complain between the acts that the ‘Poet hath let [the Staple] fall, most abruptly!’
(Int.4.75). The Staple is founded not on truth but on money, and it is explained that as
‘soone as they heard th’Infanta was got from them’ (5.1.42) the Staple went ‘all to pieces,
quite dissolv’d’ (5.1.39). This peculiar demise has been read by Marcus Nevitt as ‘a piece
of Jonsonian wish-fulfilment with the arch-conservative poet fantasising a draconian
crackdown on foreign news output or the wholesale destruction of this new media’ (2005,
64). The latter of these two possibilities seems more tenable, but Nevitt does not explore
the reasons for Jonson’s opposition to the newssheet, or coranto, medium.
Jonson was evidently familiar with the coranto trade, but the Staple differs from its
real-life counterparts in a number of respects. The first corantos began to emerge in the
1620s, although they were published at irregular intervals and successive editions of news
from the same publisher often lacked continuous titles. Following complaints from readers
corantos soon began to be numbered successively, creating a serialised narrative which
proved ideal for treating rumour as a ‘vendible commodity … because it is a kind of truth
which can always be corrected at a later date’ (Nevitt 2005, 54). The coranto writers freely
admitted the limits of their reporting:
I thinke it not unfit to resolve a question which was lately made unto mee viz.
wherefore I would publish any tidings which were only rumoured without any
certainty: I will answer that I doe it to shew both my love and diligence to the
unpartiall Reader. And that I rather will write true tidings only to be rumoured,
when I am not fully sure of them, then to write false tidings to bee true, which will
76
afterwards prove otherwise. (Late Newes or True Relations, 30 (2 July 1624), cited
in Nevitt 2005, 58)
Customer loyalty was therefore ingeniously assured by the corantos leaving their readers
‘little choice but to acquire the next number in the series which would either confirm or
deny the earlier stories they had already bought or heard’ (Nevitt 2005, 57).
Because they purveyed rumour and hearsay, corantos tend to be viewed as
ephemeral documents. Critics of the Staple consider the news office to be a similarly
fleeting enterprise, a reading supported by its ending ‘all to pieces, quite dissolv’d (5.1.39).
But Jonson’s final assertion of the immateriality of the news office is threatened by the fact
that while it operated, the Staple’s identity was reified, and its monopoly reasserted, by
every news story it ran. The news office does not, like many coranto publishers, publish
‘antiquated Pamphlets, with new dates’ (1.5.61), but has a ready supply of novel, if
spurious, news ‘from the Mint … fresh and new stamp’d (1.5.62). The truth value of the
stories is subjective (at one point, Fitton glibly admits that any one story is ‘as true as the
rest’ (3.2.93)), and so patent nonsense becomes patented nonsense, as every story is
‘registred’ and ‘issue’d under the Seale of the Office, / As Staple Newes; no other newes be
currant’ (1.2.34-36). The Staple seal, then, is not a guarantee of verifiable veracity, but of
entertainment value,87 and every story issued is a further step towards the monopolisation
of the news market.
Loewenstein notes that the Staple seeks to monopolise information (2008, 343) and
identifies Jonson among the ‘prior monopolists of information’ (2008, 342), but he does
not explore the tension between the two. Jonson was not opposed to coranto publishers
solely because they commodified rumour, but because their fluid conception of truth,
whereby verisimilitude was redefined on an issue-by-issue basis, threatened Jonson’s
claims to present truth in his plays. Jonson uses contemporary satire to reveal the foibles of
human nature, holding up a mirror to his audience ‘wherin the age may see her owne
folly.’ The coranto publisher’s relativisation of veracity denigrates the truth claims of
Jonson’s drama, and Alan B. Farmer describes the Staple as ‘as an early salvo in what John
Milton, during the English Civil War, would [in Areopagitica] call “the wars of Truth”’
(2006, 129). The Staple’s systematic stamping of specious yarns with their own seal also
87
Jonson dolefully recognises ‘the advantage of manuscript circulation … is that it enables [coranto
publishers] to target their lies to the specifically credulous’ (J. Loewenstein 2008, 337). Jonson’s perpetual
struggle against the misreadings and misunderstandings of his audience is sidestepped by this new medium
he abhors.
77
undermines the connection between self-identification and merit asserted by Jonson’s
publication of his Workes in 1616. Jonson fears that the value of the authorial stamp will
be degraded, justifying Vulcan’s destruction of Jonson’s library in a fire:
Thou’lt say
There were some pieces of as base allay,
And as false stampe there; parcels of a Play,
Fitter to see the fire-light than the day. (An Execration Against Vulcan ll.41-44)
Some critics do indeed consider the Staple ‘fitter to see the fire-light than the day,’ and the
disappointing ending might lead us to conclude with Dryden that Jonson’s last plays ‘were
but his dotages’ (1972, 17:57). The Staple’s predecessor, The Devil is an Asse (1616), was
a morality play ‘written at the height of [Jonson’s] powers’ (Happé 1996, 1). But the
tedious reiteration of the play’s moral in the final scenes of the Staple shows Jonson’s
powers faltering, as ‘explicit moralising … suggests that the dramatist has somehow lost
control of his medium, or is uncomfortable in it and has to fall back on the didactic because
the implicit and the oblique are not powerful enough for him’ (Partridge 1958, 186).
Sanders’ suggestion that the Staple ‘draws on a morality tradition that pitted prodigality
against avarice, but employs that structure as an enabling rather than a constrictive
framework’ (1998a, 184) is questionable. The allegory of Pecunia and the opposition
between prodigality and avarice anticipates, even demands, a conventional morality play
ending. Accordingly, at the end of the play the Aristotelian golden mean is dutifully
invoked by Pecunia as she advocates ‘the middle ground between wasteful prodigality and
covetous meanness, in order to prescribe a future course for her own treatment, as well as
for her influence on others’ (Deng 2008, 245). But we cannot help but feel dissatisfied. In
the Staple ‘the characters who are good are not likable’ (Penuel 2009, 138), and Peniboy
Canter’s perpetual moralising is tiresome, leading us to agree with Anne Barton that the
parable of the prodigal son has always been potentially subversive. The dissolute
young man who has fed the swine, slept with the whores and seen the strange cities
can scarcely fail to seem more interesting and vital than his virtuous stay-at-home
brother, who seems unable to rise to anything beyond outrage at the waste of a
fatted calf. (1984, 242)
78
The Staple, then, is left a little flat by Jonson’s ultimate rejection of the propensity to
commodify, but George Herbert takes the play’s flirtation with commodification and
embraces it.
The Temple is a sinuous exposition of Herbert’s spiritual struggles. He persistently
represents salvation as a transaction, and as The Temple was published in 1633, a year
before the first performance of Comus, Herbert should be considered as a crucial source for
Milton’s economic soteriology. By examining ‘Avarice,’ ‘The Pearl,’ ‘Ungratefulnesse,’
‘Dialogue,’ and ‘Redemption,’ I will trace the gradual development of Herbert’s economic
soteriology from a puritanical contemptus mundi towards an explicit understanding of
redemption as a bargain struck between man and God.
In Herbert’s poetry we find recurrent appeals to Puritan ideas: the devotion to
Scripture, the belief in ministers as God’s instruments, the spiritual confidence which
informs audaciously personal approaches to God, and the use of the Puritan plain style to
represent divine matters in everyday terms (Hunter 1988, 228). This is the legacy of
Herbert’s time at Cambridge, which coincided with ‘the golden years of Puritan leadership,
not only at the various colleges but at the great churches of the city as well’ (Hunter 1988,
240).88 Cambridge was home to many of the foremost English theologians of the period,
including William Perkins, William Ames, Richard Sibbes, and John Preston (Strier 1983,
85), and he may have had these figures in mind when he told his father of ‘those infinite
Volumes of Divinity, which yet every day swell, and grow bigger’ (Walton 1927, 329).
Herbert was not, however, merely keeping his father abreast of the latest theological
developments, but was facing the eternal predicament of students: ‘I am scarce able with
much ado to make one half years allowance, shake hands with the other: and yet if a Book
of four or five Shillings, come in my way, I buy it, though I fast for it’ (Walton 1927, 329).
Shortly after graduation in 1620, Herbert was appointed public orator of the
university, and his royal addresses so impressed the king that he sought Herbert’s company
on future visits. The opportunity to further impress the king (Eliot 1962, 9) arose when
Andrew Melvin, a Minister of the Scotch Church, and Rector of St. Andrews; who,
by a long and constant Converse, with a discontented part of that Clergy which
oppos’d Episcopacy, became at last to be a chief leader of that Faction… being a
man of learning, and inclin’d to Satyrical Poetry, had scatter’d many malicious
88
At Herbert’s college, Trinity, ‘the chapel services were Puritan in character, and even Laud could not get
the communion table moved to the east end until 1636’ (Morison 1935, 88, cited in Hunter 1988, 240).
79
bitter Verses against our Liturgy, our Ceremonies, and our Church-government.
(Walton 1927, 271)
The most notable of Melville’s ‘bitter Verses’ was Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria, ‘a long
polemical Latin poem in defence of Puritan liturgical usage’ (Herbert 1965, 177). In
response, Herbert wrote Musae Responsoriae, a poem which dutifully ‘celebrate[d] the
moderate orderliness of English worship and ridiculed the zeal and obstinacy of the Scots’
(Doelman 2000, 72).89
After the death of King James, Herbert’s desire for a public career waned, and in
1627 he resigned as Public Orator. After a short spell as a canon in Lincoln Cathedral, he
became the rector and later priest of a quiet country village, Bemerton. It is at this time that
‘Herbert almost certainly began to write his English poems, which speak with a new
intensity, with a new consciousness of strain, uncertainty, and loss’ (Bell 1979, 69).90
However, not everyone agreed with his change of career, and he was censured by ‘sober
men … as a man that did not manage his brave parts to his best advantage and preferment,
but lost himself in an humble way’ (Oley 1652, xxii).
In Bemerton, Herbert consolidated the friendship with Nicholas Ferrar which had
long been ‘maintain’d without any interview, but only by loving and endearing Letters’
(Walton 1927, 312). Like Herbert, Ferrar abandoned a promising public career for the
religious seclusion of Bemerton. In 1622 Ferrar had succeeded his brother John as deputy
of the Virginia Company, and in 1624 he sat in Parliament to defend the company’s
interests.91 Ferrar was tasked with making a complaint ‘to the parliament of those several
persons that had abused the king’s ears, and so highly wronged the company … all which
he performed so well and pleasingly, that there was a great notice taken of him’ (J. Ferrar
and Jebb 1855, 19–20). But despite Ferrar’s eloquent defence, the company soon ceased
operations. It is not unreasonable to surmise that the conversations between Ferrar and
89
Obstinacy and zeal were undoubtedly two qualities possessed by Melville, as when he was called before
the King and prominent members of the English Church to account for his antiepiscopalian activities, he
‘tooke occasioun to tell [the Archbishop of Canterbury] plainlie in his face, before the counsel, all that he
thought. He charged him with all the corruptions, vanities, and superstitiouns of their charge, with
profanatioun of the Sabboth, silencing, imprisoning, and bearing doun of faithfull preachers, holding up of
antichristian hierarchie, and Popish ceremonies. Taking him by the whyte sleeves of his rotchet, and shaiking
them, [he] called them “Romish rags,” and a “part of the Beast’s marke”’ (Calderwood 1845, 6:597).
90
The tensions between inherited faith, worldly disillusionment, and the demands of a position in the
Anglican Church are also found in the work of Herbert’s friend, John Donne. Indeed, Douglas Bush has
noted that ‘Herbert’s career was not unlike Donne’s’ (1945, 137).
91
Herbert also sat as Member of Parliament for Montgomery during 1624. Montgomery is situated on the
edge of the Welsh Marches, only thirty miles from Ludlow Castle, where Comus was performed.
80
Herbert might have touched on the former’s youthful experience in the mercurial field of
Stuart economic policies.
Ferrar and Herbert’s lives followed a shared trajectory from engagement with
parliamentary economics to a retirement devoted to religion, and this is reflected in their
tendency to describe spiritual matters in the language of commerce. Herbert deemed
Ferrar’s ‘Concordance of the Four Evangelists … a most inestimable jewel’ (Peckard
1790, 203), and on his deathbed entrusted to Ferrar the manuscript later described by
Milton’s nephew, Edward Philips, as ‘those so generally known and approved Poems
Entitled the Temple’ (1675, 54). Having ‘many & many a time read [Herbert’s poems]
over, & embraced & kissed again & again... [Ferrar] sayd, he could not sufficiently admire
it, as a rich Jewell’ (N. Ferrar 1938, 59). Indeed, in the decades after his death, Herbert’s
work was commonly likened to precious metals. Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche, dated
between 1648 and 1650 (Patrides 1983, 69), concludes a discussion of Pindar and Flaccus
by noting that
Yet neither of their empires was so vast
But they left Herbert too full room to reign,
Who Lyric’s pure and precious Metal cast
In holier moulds. (Canto IV, Stanza 102)
It might reasonably be objected that eulogies which compare esteemed poets to gems and
gold are commonplace, but in Herbert’s case such readings are apposite because The
Temple is suffused with images of trade, investments, and treasure. Such worldliness jars
with the common depiction of Herbert as a meek and mild country pastor, when he was in
fact ‘somewhat haughty’ (Eliot 1962, 13) and had as a young man been immersed in
worldly affairs. We must, moreover, reject the assumption that the sensual tangibility of
Herbert’s poems betrays a tendency towards a High Church or even Catholic aesthetic. As
C. S. Lewis reminds us, ‘Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists’ (1954, 34), and
Herbert is demonstrably such a Protestant.
The reasons for Herbert’s recurrent appeals to sensuality are threefold. Firstly,
Herbert saw his poetry as didactic, and he urged Ferrar to publish The Temple if ‘it may
turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul’ (Walton 1927, 314). Religious poetry is
more likely to encourage ‘meditation on spiritual virtues’ (Strier 1983, 146) if it is
composed in accessible terms, and so Herbert became ‘the master of the simple everyday
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word in the right place’ (1962, 28).92 The potential objection that Herbert’s preoccupation
with gold, gems, and treasure betrays a sinful avarice is groundless, because these riches
are used to lead the reader towards God, and ‘the use of God’s gifts is not wrongly directed
when it is referred to that end to which the Author himself created and destined them for
us, since he created them for our good, not for our ruin’ (Calvin 1960 1:720). Herbert
therefore wrote in the Horatian mode by ‘mixing sweet, and fit, [to] teach life the right’
(Jonson VIII 1947, 327, l.334), as delineated in Joshua Poole’s England’s Parnassus
(1657):
Let the Poet use his lawfull bait,
To make men swallow what they else would hate,
Like wise Physicians that their pills infold
In sugar, paper, or the leaves of gold,
And by a vertuous fraud and honest stealth,
Cozen unwilling Patients into health. (p.7–8)
The second reason for Herbert’s conceptualisation of religion in economic terms is his
understanding of salvation, informed by the etymological roots of ‘redemption’ in the
Latin redimere, ‘to buy back’ (Mulder 1969, 76). Bernard Knieger suggests that this
etymology underpins Herbert’s conception of the crucifixion as ‘a purchase-sale in which
Christ, going about God’s business, purchased (for man) mankind’s salvation at the cost of
His own degradation and agony’ (1966, 111). Of course, this was not Herbert’s innovation,
but is found throughout the Bible: St. Paul reminds the Corinthians that they were ‘bought
with a price’ (1 Cor. 6:20), while in Hebrews 9:15 Jesus is ‘the mediator of the new
testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under
the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance’
(Mollenkott 1979, 505).
This latter passage brings us to the third reason for the prevalence of economic
imagery in The Temple, and supports Robert Montgomery’s suggestion that Herbert
‘shares with most writers of the age a fondness for similitudes, for precise and extensive
correspondences’ (1960, 457). The foremost seventeenth-century theological doctrine
based on ‘precise and extensive correspondences’ was covenant theology, the major
proponents of which were Herbert’s Cambridge contemporaries, Richard Sibbes and John
92
As Herbert asked in ‘Jordan (I),’ ‘must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines, / Catching the sense at
two removes?’ (ll.9-10)
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Preston. With such prominent covenant theologians preaching at Cambridge while Herbert
was there, it is unsurprising that The Temple repeatedly represents salvation as a bargain
struck between man and God. Herbert was far from anomalous in his understanding of the
relationship between man and God in economic terms, and Jeffrey G. Sobosan’s claim that
‘one finds in George Herbert less of a stress on the legalistic aspects of redemption’ (1977,
400) seems questionable.
While Herbert drew on the latest concepts in puritan theology, he also articulated
more traditional responses to riches, as in ‘Avarice,’ which begins by addressing money as
the ‘Bane of blisse, & sourse of wo’ (l.1). Puritans advocated godly engagement with the
world, but money ‘didst so little Contribute / To this great Kingdome, which thou now hast
gott’ (ll.5-6), that its status is undeserved: ‘Whence Com’st thou, that thou art so fresh &
fine? / I know thy Parentage is base and low: / Man found thee poore and durty in a mine’
(ll.2-4).
Herbert’s reminder of money’s ‘base and low parentage’ in spite of its bright[ness]’
(l.9) introduces the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. This doctrine asserts that all man’s
actions, however apparently virtuous, are tainted by the ‘base and low’ sin of his Edenic
parents. Just as money can only have the appearance of brightness, so too man can only
have the appearance of virtue. Consequently, man can ‘little Contribute / To this great
Kingdome’ because works are immaterial and salvation is by faith alone.
Fallen man thinks his mining is beneficial, as he digs gold ‘out of [its] dark cave &
grott: / Then forcing [it] by fire he ma[kes it] bright’ (ll.8-9). But this is, for Herbert, an
idolatrous parody of redemption, which is only achieved through Christ’s willingness to
‘feele all smart’ (‘Dialogue,’ l.31) so that man might ‘gaine at harvest an eternall Treasure’
(‘Our Life is Hid with Christ in God,’ l.10). There is a particular affinity with ‘To All
Angels & Saints,’ which represents the ‘Mother of my God’ (l.10) as ‘the holy mine,
whence came the gold, / The great restorative for all decay’ (ll.11-12). The two poems are
linked by a stratified chain of being: in ‘To All Angels and Saints,’ Jesus is the gold mined
by God from Mary, while in ‘Avarice,’ man is the ore mined by Jesus, and gold is the ore
mined by man.
The heredity of such connections is emphasised in ‘Avarice’ when money ‘hast gott
the face of man’ (l.10) and man has ‘with [his] stamp and seale transferr’d [his] right’
(l.11), as in ‘Perirrhanterium,’ where ‘Man is Gods Image; but a poore Man is / Christs
Stampe’ (ll.379-380). Herbert urges his readers ‘Both Images Regard’ (l.380), echoing
Donne’s ‘The Canonization’: ‘the king’s real, or his stamped face / Contemplate’ (2010,
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150, ll.7–8). Donne imagines that ‘countries, towns, courts – beg from above / A pattern of
your love’ (ll.44-5), just as Herbert placed the love of God above the love of money:
If Soules be made of earthly mold,
Let them love gold.
If borne on high,
Let them unto their kindred fly. (‘Vanity (II),’ ll.11-14)
The man of ‘Avarice’ is evidently ‘of earthly mold,’ as his distinction from money
is elided by the sonnet’s volta, ‘stamp and seal transferred our right.’ Man surrenders his
superiority with his ‘stamp and seal,’ and the volta is literalised by the transposition of man
and gold: ‘thou art the man, & man but drosse to thee’ (l.12). Man’s confusion regarding
identity and true value has dire consequences: ‘Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee
rich, / And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch’ (ll.13-14). A similar image is found in
‘Providence,’ which claims God
Hast hidd mettalls: man may take them thence.
But at his perill: when he digs the place,
He makes a grave; as if the thing had sense,
And threatned man, that he should fill the space. (ll.81-4)93
Herbert makes a similar complaint regarding man’s corruption by greed in ‘The Church
Militant,’ where he claims that ‘Gold and Grace did never yet agree: / Religion alwaies
sides with povertie’ (ll.251-2). The natives of ‘America … have their times of Gospel, ev’n
as we’ (ll.247-8), but Herbert maintains that Europeans are mistaken when they think to
profit from American gold. The Europeans in fact heap up sins quicker than bullion, and
God ‘prepare[s] for [the natives] a way / By carrying first their Gold from them away’
(ll.249-50). In ‘Avarice’ man erroneously thought he grew richer from mining and in ‘The
Church Militant’ he again mistakes his downfall for his success, and so ‘wee thinke we
robb them, but we think amisse. / Wee are more poore, & they more rich by this’ (ll.2534).
While the idea of Herbert being an unworldly country pastor is problematised in
‘Avarice,’ it is refuted in ‘The Pearl.’ The poem is subtitled ‘Math. 13.45,’ and so Herbert
93
This also foreshadows Paradise Lost, where ‘impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth / For
Treasures better hid’ (PL 1.686-8).
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establishes the biblical context: ‘the kingdome of heaven is like unto a marchant man,
seeking goodly pearles: Who when hee had found one pearle of great price, he went and
solde all that he had, and bought it.’ Herbert is the ‘marchant man,’ and this poem surveys
various ‘goodly pearles,’ weighing their value against the ‘one pearle of great price.’
Herbert begins by declaring ‘I know the ways of Learning’ (l.1), and he ‘believes
that the more exact his knowledge of the things he is renouncing, the more meaningful his
renunciation’ (Strier 1983, 88). ‘Vanitie (I)’ adopts a similar strategy by attacking ‘fleet
Astronomer[s]’ (l.1), ‘nimble Diver[s]’ (l.8), and ‘subtil Chymick[s]’ (l.15) before asking
‘what hath not Man wrought out and found, / But his deare God?’ (ll.22-3). In ‘The Pearl,’
Herbert knows ‘What Reason hath from Nature borrowed, / Or of it self, like a good
huswife spunne / In Laws and Policie’ (ll.3-5).
Economic imagery is introduced and combined with the trope of the Protestant
work ethic, as duty inspires reason to become ‘like a good huswife.’ But Herbert is not
lauding reason here, as each verse of ‘The Pearl’ describes an object consequently
repudiated by the godly refrain ‘But I love thee’ which concludes each verse.94 He is
familiar with seventeenth-century economic matters, as he knows ‘both the old discoveries,
& New found seas, / The stock & surplus, cause & history’ (ll.7-8).
But just as Herbert is poised to explore these concepts further, he retreats, claiming
that although ‘All these stand open, or I have the keyes. / Yet I love thee’ (ll.9-10). This
encapsulates Herbert’s attitude towards economic ideas: they are used to facilitate the
contemplation of God and taken no further, and so while he ‘does not repudiate contractual
and economic language entirely … he limits it carefully’ (Gordis 1996, 386). Herbert
adopts the same strategy in ‘The Odour,’ which Walton remarks ‘seems to rejoyce in the
thoughts of that word Jesus, and say that the adding these words My Master to it, and the
often repetition of them, seem’d to perfume [Herbert’s] mind, and leave an oriental
fragrancy in his very breath’ (1927, 290). Touch, hearing, and scent combine in a
multisensory God reminiscent of ambergris, ‘a very curious substance, and so important as
an article of commerce’ (Melville 1962, 406):
How sweetly doth My Master sound? My Master.
As Amber-greese leaves a rich sent
Unto the taster:
So doe these words a sweet content,
94
This criticism of rationality recalls Luther’s belief that ‘reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never
comes to the aid of spiritual things’ (1857, 154).
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An Orientall fragrancy, My Master. (ll.1-5)
The next stanza of ‘The Pearl’ addresses ‘The wayes of Honor. What mantaines / The
quick returnes of curtesie and witt: / In vyes of favours, whether partie gains’ (ll.11-13).
The machinations of the court are represented in the language of commerce: flatteries
become investments which can yield ‘quick returns,’ while rival courtiers become like
trading companies competing to ensure that their ‘partie gains’ a lucrative monopoly of
‘favours.’ Herbert is not seduced by this, however, as he can ‘now behold the Court with
an impartial Eye, and see plainly, that it is made up of Fraud, and Tittles, and Flattery, and
many other such empty, imaginary painted Pleasures that are so empty, as not to satisfy
when they are enjoy’d’ (Walton 1927, 289). Contrasted to this is ‘God and His service,’
wherein ‘is a fulness of all joy and pleasure, and so satiety’ (289), and so Herbert restates
‘Yet I love thee’ (‘The Pearl,’ l.20).95
The third concept to be repudiated is the pleasures of the flesh. With C. S. Lewis’s
admonition in mind, we must remember Herbert is no dour puritan. He ‘know[s] the ways
of Pleasure. The sweet strains, / The Lullings and the rellishes of itt; / The propositions of
hott blood and braines’ (ll.21-3). The music evoked by ‘sweet strains’ and ‘lullings’ is
amplified by Herbert’s knowledge of ‘what Mirth and Musiqe mean’ (l.24), and his
‘chiefest recreation’ being ‘Musick, in which heavenly Art he was a most excellent Master’
(Walton 1927, 303). Like Luther, he rejects the possibility of ascetic detachment, instead
asserting ‘my stuff is flesh, not brasse’ (l.27). Herbert cannot escape worldly temptations,
and so a perpetual battle rages between the compulsion towards sensual indulgence and the
desire to follow Jesus:
My senses live,
And grumble oft; that they have more in mee
Then he, that curbs them, being but one to five.
Yet I love thee. (ll.28-30)
95
Herbert concurs here with St. Augustine’s views on the distinction between things ‘which are to be
enjoyed’ and things ‘which are to be used … if we choose to enjoy things that are to be used, our advance is
impeded and sometimes even diverted, and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are
to be enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things’ (St. Augustine 1997, 9). For Herbert,
the love of court life and its worldly masters is a misdirection of the devotion that should be reserved for
God.
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Herbert’s virtue, then, is neither fugitive nor cloistered, but willing to engage with worldly
temptations. He is like the ‘honest man’ in ‘Constancy,’ who,
When great trials come,
Nor seeks, nor shunnes them, but doth calmly stay,
Till he the thing & the example Waigh:
All being brought into a Summe. (ll.6-9)
The catalogue of ‘goodly pearls’ concludes with Herbert claiming that ‘I know all these, &
have them in my hand. / Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes / I fly to thee’ (ll.31-3).
Having weighed ‘the thing and example’ of worldly pursuits in his hand, Herbert
understands the extent of man’s deviance from God. He is willing to ‘fly to [God],’ but
total depravity means that he can only conceive of such an act in postlapsarian terms.
Herbert’s tainted will therefore imagines the act of salvation as a monetary transaction: ‘I
fully understand, / Both the main sale, and the commodities: / And at what rate & price I
have thy love’ (ll.33-5). But the ‘rate and price’ of salvation is not payable through the
actions of the perverted postlapsarian will:
Yet through these labarinths, not my groveling witt,
But thy silk twist, let downe from heaven to mee,
Did both conduct, & teach mee, how by it
To climbe to Thee. (ll.37-40)
Man can gain nothing truly valuable from intellectual, courtly, or sensual activities; they
are mere manifestations of a ‘groveling witt’ misusing God’s gifts, as in ‘Sighs and
Grones,’ where Herbert laments ‘I have abus’d thy stock, destroy’d thy woods, / Suck’d all
thy Magazins: my head did ake, / Till it found out how to consume thy goods’ (ll.9-11).
Herbert’s ‘grovelling witt’ is manifest in his conceptualisation of the redemptive mercy of
heaven as a ‘silk twist’ which he must climb up like a clandestine lover. In ‘The Pearl,’
man learns to ‘consume thy goods’ and ‘climbe to thee,’ not by any action of his own, but
by ascending the ‘silk twist let down from heaven.’ He recognises his own corruption, and
the refrain ‘yet I love thee’ expresses the faith that is the sole signifier of salvation.
In ‘Ungratefulnesse,’ Herbert develops the economic conceptualisation of salvation
of ‘The Pearl’ into an extended treatment of covenant theology. He begins by asking ‘Lord,
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with what bounty and rare clemency / Hast thou redeem’d us from the grave?’ (ll.1-2), and
God’s clemency is ‘rare’ due to the inscrutability of the ‘voluntary condescension on
God’s part’ in the Covenant of Grace (Westminster Confession of Faith 1913, 13). He
continues:
If thou hadst let us runne,
Gladly had man ador’d the sunne,
And thought his God most brave:
Where now wee shall be better Gods, then hee. (ll.3-6)
Negating the potential idolatry of man’s adoration of the sun, Herbert’s homonymy
suggests we should instead worship the Son. A similar concept informs ‘Our Life is Hid
with Christ in God’: ‘Life hath with the Sunne a double motion. / The first is strait, and our
diurnal freind, / The other hid, & doth obliquely bend’ (ll.2-4). But here the two poems
deviate, as Herbert asserts that ‘One life is wrapt in flesh, and tends to earth: / The other
winds towards Him, whose happy birth / Taught mee to live here so’ (ll.5-7).96
‘Our Life is Hid with Christ in God’ urges rejection of ‘life … wrapt in flesh’ in
favour of the spiritual life, through which man ‘gaine[s] at harvest an eternall Treasure’
(l.10). In ‘Ungratefulnesse’, it is the Incarnation, the very thing ‘wrapt in flesh,’ that is to
be clung to instead of abstract considerations of glory. This embodies Luther’s distinction
between fascination with the inscrutable aspects of the Godhead, the ‘theology of glory,’
and the ‘theology of the cross’: ‘that person does not deserve to be called a theologian who
looks upon the invisible things of God … he deserves to be called a theologian, however,
who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the
cross’ (Luther 1955 31:40).97 These concepts are represented by God’s ‘two rare cabinets
full of treasure, / The Trinity, & Incarnation’ (ll.7-8), which have both been ‘unlockd’ (l.9).
That the two cabinets signify the Covenants of Works and Grace is suggested by the
introduction of contractual imagery, as God ‘Made them jewells to betroth / The work of
thy creation / Unto thy selfe in everlasting pleasure’ (ll.9-12). The Trinity and Incarnation
become dowry jewels, and man’s relationship to God is formulated in explicitly
96
The spiritual life ‘wind[ing]’ upwards ‘towards Him’ continues the earlier imagery of the redemptive silk
twist.
97
To illustrate the distinction between the two theologies, Luther cites John 14:8-9: ‘Philippe sayd unto
[Jesus], Lord, shewe us thy Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus sayd unto him, I have bene so long time with
you, and hast thou not knowen mee, Philippe? he that hath seene me, hath seene my Father.’
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contractual terms, the terms of covenant theology.98 These images of jewels, pleasure, and
exclusive betrothal prefigure the contested ownership of the Lady’s virginal ‘unsun’d
heaps / Of Misers treasure’ (ll.398–9) in Comus.
Like the mysterious nature of the Lady’s virginity, ‘the statelier cabinet is the
Trinity, / Whose sparkling light accesse denies’ (ll.13-14), evoking Isaiah 45:15: ‘Verily
thou art a God that hidest thyself.’ The true nature of the godhead will not be revealed until
‘Death blow / The dust into our eyes: / For by that powder thou wilt make us see’ (ll.1618). Dust is also associated with mortality in Paradise Lost, as when the judgement of
Adam concludes with ‘dust thou art, and shalt to dust returne’ (PL 10.208). But while the
Fall will ultimately lead God to ‘withdraw / His presence from among [men]’ (PL 12.1078), in ‘Ungratefulnesse’ dust leads not to being cut off from God, but gaining full
knowledge.99 But such knowledge is only postmortal, and this ignorance frightens Herbert,
but ‘as the first [cabinet] affrights, / [The second] may allure us with delights’ (ll.21-2).
Richard Strier suggests that Herbert ‘simply moves on, happily, from “the majesty” to “the
other”’ (1983, 28), but ‘affright’ suggests that Herbert moves on not from happiness, but
fear, and with some lingering curiosity about the theology of glory.
All God’s ‘sweets are pack’d up’ (l.19) in the Incarnation, which serves to ‘allure
us with delights’. The Incarnation thus embodies God’s accommodation; postlapsarian
man cannot comprehend God in Himself, but He becomes relatable through the incarnated
Jesus. This is further supported by the Incarnation appealing to postlapsarian man’s
corrupted proclivity for sensual ‘sweets,’ and ‘this Bone wee know; / For wee have all of
us just such another’ (ll.23-4) explicitly states the parity between the Incarnation and man.
In suggesting that ‘the surrender to sensory imagery … [makes] Herbert seem childlike at
times’ (1974, 635), Robert Higbie misunderstands Herbert’s technique. Herbert’s
conception of accommodation follows Calvin, who believed that Scripture ‘proceeds at the
pace of a mother stooping to her child, so to speak, so as not to leave us behind in our
weakness’ (Calvin 1960, 2:925–6), and Moses’ account of the creation of angels was
spoken ‘after the manner of the common people’ (Calvin 1960, 1:162). Herbert uses
sensual imagery because his readers are fallen, and the sinfulness of man is made clear in
the penultimate stanza.
God and man entered into a covenant, the terms of which were defined in advance:
‘those who will believe in the Redeemer have His righteousness ascribed to them’ (P.
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This divine betrothal also evokes the biblical representation of the church as Christ’s wife.
The distinction between the two texts is further demonstrated by the fact that Adam’s vision of ‘the
nebulous horizons of human history’ (Sawday 2007, 262) is made possible not by dust, but by three drops
from the ‘well of life’ (PL 11.416).
99
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Miller 1939, 377). But man attempts to renege on the deal. In a parodic inversion of the
‘statelier cabinet,’ ‘unlockt’ but inaccessible due to ‘sparkling light,’ man is ‘close,
reserv’d & dark to thee’ (l.25). The Covenant of Grace asks little from man, ‘but a heart’
(l.26), but man ‘cavils instantlie’ (l.27), like Hotspur, who, ‘in the way of bargain … [will]
cavil on the ninth part of a hair’ (1 Henry IV, 3.1.140). A similar dynamic occurs in ‘Faith,’
where the speaker ‘Owed thousands & much more: / I did believe, that I did nothing owe, /
And liv’d accordingly’ (ll.13-15).
Man’s dishonest quibbling in ‘Ungratefulnesse’ disintegrates the fleeting accord
between man and incarnated God. Herbert widens the gap by describing man’s ‘poore
cabinet of bone’ (l.28), starkly contrasting Jesus’ representations as ‘flesh,’ the
Incarnation’s ‘bounty,’ and a cabinet of ‘sweets.’ Jesus’ similarity to man was previously
emphasised by ‘this box we know/ For we have all of us just such another,’ but now
‘Sinnes have their box apart’ in man, with no counterpart in Jesus. Herbert concludes by
lamenting man’s ‘defrauding thee, who gavest two for one’ (l.30), and so despite the
covenant being unevenly weighted in man’s favour, a bargain in both senses of the word, it
is squandered.100
Anxiety regarding man’s unworthiness of salvation is explored further in
‘Dialogue,’ a conversation between man and his ‘sweetest Saviour’ (l.1), respectively
corresponding to the body and soul. The legacy of Herbert’s time at Cambridge is clear, as
the soul-body dialogue was popular among those driven by puritan soteriological concerns.
Herbert’s education in rhetoric is also apparent, as the first stanza is a tripartite syllogism
which begins by establishing the conditional premise and consequence:
If my soul
Were but worth the having,
Quickly should I then controule
Any thought of waving. (ll.1-4, emphasis added)
Herbert’s spiritual doubts have been expressed mutedly in the poems discussed so far, but
in ‘Dialogue’ ‘the soul feels sin too strongly’ (Fish 1978, 121) and erupts into prostrated
abasement worthy of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. In Marvell’s A Dialogue between the Soul
and Body, the body complains of ‘the cramp of Hope’ (l.34) and ‘the palsy shakes of Fear’
(l.35), and so too Herbert’s man miserably concludes his syllogism:
100
Herbert reminds us in ‘Vanitie (II)’ that ‘to purchase heaven for repenting / Is no hard rate’ (ll.9-10).
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But when all my care and paines
Cannot give the Name of gaines
To thy wretch so full of staines,
What delight or hope remaines? (ll.5-8)
Man’s anguished uncertainty transforms him into a ‘wretch so full of stains’ who cannot
understand what value he possesses for God, and there is a fear of squandered economic
effort here, as the attempt to improve the value of his soul by expending ‘cares and pains’
is unsuccessful. Man has failed to refine his soiled raw spiritual material into a product
worthy of God, just as the speaker of ‘Grace’ complains ‘my stock lies dead, & no
encrease / Doth my dull husbandrie improve’ (ll.1-2). In ‘Dialogue,’ God reminds man that
the value of his soul is not determined by mortal criteria, but is weighed on the inscrutable
divine scale:
What, Child, is the ballance thine,
Thine the poise & measure?
If I say thou shalt be mine;
Finger not my treasure. (ll.9-12)
God reiterates Luther’s dictum that reason ‘never comes to the aid of spiritual things,’ and
so Herbert has erred by attempting to weigh the bargain of salvation on a worldly
‘balance,’ with its rational concerns of value, profit, and loss. Salvation is only
conceptualised as a transaction because these are the terms in which fallen man thinks; it is
an idea born of accommodative analogy, not perfect parity.
God continues: ‘What the gaines in having thee / Doe amount to, onely he, / Who
for Man was sold, can see’ (ll.13-15). By his own standards, man is a worthless ‘wretch so
full of stains,’ but God has a different ‘poise and measure,’ and so the ‘gains in having
thee’ are knowable only to Jesus. The reader is also denied omniscience. Our fallen state is
emphasised because we too are unaware what ‘the gains in having thee’ truly ‘amount to’;
we know nothing more than what God tells us. Herbert develops the allegory of
transactional salvation by describing Jesus as the one who ‘transferr’d th’ accounts to
[God]’ (l.16), and so God becomes ‘a gigantic accountant’ (Knieger 1966, 133) with Jesus
as his apprentice in the family business.
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While ‘Dialogue’ began with man’s despair that his ‘cares and pains’ did not raise
him from being a ‘wretch so full of stains,’ he now realises he misunderstood his role in
salvation:
But as I can see no merrit,
Leading to this favour:
So the way to fitt me for it
Is beyond my savour. (ll.17-20)
Luther held that works-religion, the notion that good works can earn salvation, was a
falsehood, albeit a seductive one. As Strier reminds us, ‘nothing is more basic to
Reformation theology than the denial that man can in any way merit salvation’ (1983, 1),
and this is precisely what Herbert recognises here. He can never deserve the ‘favour’ of
salvation, as total depravity leaves him inalterably ‘full of stains.’ Consequently, nothing
he can do will ever ‘fit [him] for it,’ and so the mechanism of salvation, like the value of
fallen man in God’s eyes, is unknowable: ‘as the reason then is thine: / So the way is none
of mine’ (ll.21-2).
Herbert renounces agency in the act of salvation by ‘disclaim[ing] the whole
designe’ (l.23), and as soon as he does so, ‘Sinne disclaimes’ (l.24) too. The impediment to
salvation has been man’s mistaken belief that he could play any part in it; when he
‘resigne[s]’ (l.24), the process of salvation can progress. By ‘resign[ing],’ man relinquishes
possession of his soul to Jesus, who in turn ‘transferr[s] the account’ to God.101 Just as a
covenant is an agreement signed by both parties, man’s decision to re-sign restates his
personal acceptance of the terms of the Covenant of Grace.
Herbert’s decision is confirmed by God, as ‘that is all’ (l.25) He needs:
If that I could
Gett without repining;
And my clay, my creature, would
Follow my resigning. (ll.25-8)
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We are reminded of Luis Vaz de Camões’s The Lusíads (1572), where Henry of Burgundy, ‘Pull’d by
Death’s hand down from this mortal Stage, / His Spirit, unto Him, that gave it, gave’ (1940, 91, Cant. 3.28).
The influence of The Lusíads on Paradise Lost has long been noted; see Hoxby 2002, 291 n.26.
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The parallelism of the establishment and ratification of the Covenant of Grace is expressed
by God’s wish that ‘my creature, would / Follow my resigning,’ and so man’s decision to
‘resign’ was correct. But it is not enough for man to ‘follow my resigning’; he should do so
‘without repining.’ As man’s speeches in ‘Dialogue’ are little more than ‘repining,’ he is
not yet able to fulfil his role completely.
Recognising that man’s self-pity is rooted in an awareness of his low status, Jesus
offers his own example: ‘I did freely part / With my glory & desert, / Left all joys to feel
all smart’ (ll.29-31). If man, too, can ‘freely part’ with his worldly preoccupation with
value and status, he will be able to ascend to the ‘joys’ and ‘glorie’ that God believes are
his ‘desert.’ But man struggles with this, and his painful awareness of his unworthiness of
Jesus’ example returns in the final line, as he interrupts with the cry ‘No more. Thou
breakst my heart’ (l.32).
Herbert’s most explicit treatment of economic soteriology is found in
‘Redemption.’ The sonnet begins with the speaker identifying himself as one who has ‘bin
tenant long to a rich Lord’ (l.1) but is ‘not thriving’ (l.2). We might consequently be
tempted to read ‘Redemption’ as an allegory for the transition of economic relations, from
feudal vassalage to the autonomous capitalism that was gaining currency during Herbert’s
time. But to do so would place undue emphasis on one side of the economics-salvation
metaphor, to the neglect of the other. Instead, we must find our hermeneutic framework in
the dominant contemporary synthesis of economics and soteriology: covenant theology.102
The suggestion that ‘Redemption’ is informed by covenant theology was made as early as
1715 by George Ryley: ‘the 1st Lease this great Landlord gave to Man, his Tenant; was the
Covenant of works: by which man was bound to yeild all the profitts of the Land to his
Landlord’s use’ (1982, 67).
Man decides ‘to be bold, / And make a suit unto [his Lord] to afford / A new smallrented Lease, and cancell th’old’ (ll.2-4). The contrast drawn between ‘new’ and ‘old’
supports a reading of the two leases representing the Old and New Testaments and their
respective covenants. However, we must be careful not to interpret the transactional
imagery which suffuses ‘Redemption’ as a simple indictment of fallen man’s greed:
‘humanity is not here presented as callously materialistic, but rather as being concerned
enough with its inability to obey the law that it prays for some new and feasible means of
settling its account with the landlord’ (Mollenkott 1979, 504). Postlapsarian man is
102
Covenant theology’s combination of economics and soteriology is reflected by the continuity of the
covenants themselves. According to Zwingli, the Christian covenant ‘was in substance continuous with the
covenant of Abraham, since both pointed in different ways to the same Christ’ (Holifield 1974, 6).
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inherently unable to comply with the terms of the old covenant, so he seeks a ‘small-rented
Lease’ more spiritually affordable to his tainted soul, as ‘just it is, that I should pay the
rent, / Because the benefitt accrues to mee’ (‘Providence,’ ll.26-7). During the course of
‘The Pearl,’ ‘Ungratefulnesse,’ and ‘Dialogue,’ man has gradually come to realise the
immensity of this ‘benefit.’
Herbert begins his search for the landlord ‘in Heaven at his mannour’ (l.5), only to
be told ‘that he was lately gone / About some land, which he had dearly bought / Long
since on Earth, to take possession’ (ll.6-8). In ‘Faith,’ man’s salvation was rather modestly
valued at ‘thousands and much more,’ but here He ‘who for man was sold’ has simply
been ‘dearly bought’; Jesus’ true price is unquantifiable to postlapsarian man. Man is
undeterred, and, ‘knowing his [landlord’s] great birth … sought him accordingly in great
resorts, / In Citties, Theatres, Gardens, Parks, and Courts’ (ll.9-11). But as in Comus,
where ‘courtesie… [in] Courts of Princes… first was nam’d / And yet is most pretended’
(ll.322; 325–6), here we find Herbert emphasising ‘the vanity rather than the foulness of
sin’ (Tuve 1959, 316).103 But Tuve’s reading is not wholly accurate because the ‘foulness
of sin’ is not absent, nor is the landlord found in the places of vanity. Rather, He is ‘espyd’
(l.13) amidst the ‘ragged noise & mirth’ (l.12) of those more commonly associated with the
‘foulness of sin,’ ‘theeves & murderers’ (l.13). Having been found, the landlord ‘strait,
your suit is granted, sayd, & died’ (l.14), and so ‘Redemption’ ends with the same
abruptness as ‘Dialogue’. In the latter poem, Christ recounts His suffering for three lines
before being interrupted, but in ‘Redemption’ there is the barest of allusions to the Passion;
the ‘ragged noise and mirth’ suggest Christ’s shabby clothing and His mocking captors,
while ‘thieves and murderers’ flank him on crucifixes.
The abruptness of Jesus’ death is also necessitated by prevenient grace. Jesus
anticipated Herbert’s need for salvation, and consequently left Heaven ‘long’ (l.8) before
the speaker began his search. Moreover, Jesus’ death is part of the terms of the Covenant
of Grace and so becomes a necessary condition for man’s salvation, as ‘where a testament
is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator’ (Heb. 9:16) and so ‘it is only
the landlord’s death which activates his dying testament’ (Mollenkott 1979, 506). The
callously casual report of Jesus’ death reinforces the sense that postlapsarian man can
never merit salvation, as the speaker
103 This ironically recalls The Faerie Queene: ‘Of Court it seems, men Courtesie doe call, / For that it there
most useth to abound; And well beseemeth that in Princes hall / That vertue should be plentifully found’
(VI.i.1.1-4).
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shows no feeling of compassion, not even any evidence of surprise. There is no
better way in which Herbert could have illustrated simultaneously the
incomprehensibility of the measureless love that causes God to die for man, and
man’s unworthiness of that sacrifice because of the self-seeking meanness of his
spirit. (Mulder 1969, 76)
‘Self-seeking meanness’ is rife in The Staple of Newes, which must be read within the
wider context of the exploration of commodification by Jonson’s peers. We see him
drawing on various contemporary economic, theological, and moral approaches to the
issue, and the play’s treatment of usury both invokes and reconfigures the arguments
advanced in works such as Culpeper’s Tract against Usurie and Usurie Araigned. But the
simplistic moralising of such tracts seeps into the Staple, and we are painfully aware of the
disparity between the subtlety of Jonson’s Jacobean plays, where he ‘casts a whole world
into being and lets it revolve there, hideous in its implications’ (Partridge 1958, 186), and
the blunt didacticism of the Staple. The play’s obsession with strict dichotomy is further
manifested in Jonson’s inability to accommodate the fluidly intermingled concepts of truth
and falsity propounded by the corantos, and the Staple is suffused with the sense that the
playwright is continually asking himself ‘is the ballance thine?’
The Temple does not reject, but embraces such tensions, and we find Herbert
vacillating between depravity and sanctity, before finally recognising that the two are
inextricably linked. These poems are a product of Herbert’s familiarity with covenant
theologians in Cambridge. His puritan sympathies are evident in his mistrust of money in
‘Avarice,’ while the proclamation of worldliness in ‘The Pearl’ begins the
commodification of salvation. Herbert’s exploration of covenant theology in
‘Ungratefulnesse’ informs the anxiety expressed in ‘Dialogue’ regarding man’s true value,
before Herbert resigns himself to the inscrutability of salvation. The unfeeling narrator of
‘Redemption’ succinctly demonstrates man’s utter unworthiness of salvation, and so The
Temple depicts not the contented retirement of a country pastor, but the agonised arena
where the desire for godliness struggles with the postlapsarian compulsion to commodify,
the perpetuity of which is demonstrated by its centrality in Milton’s thought.
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Chapter 3
‘Golden Chalices and wooden Preists’: The Service of God and Mammon
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be
a merrier world.
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (2000, 274)
While Blair Hoxby suggests that ‘the young Milton first betrayed his cautious interest in
the new economic reasoning of the 1620s in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle’ (2002,
17), such an interest is also evident in the History of Moscovia and Of Reformation. All
three texts are meditations on the motivations and consequences of contemporary
developments in economic thought, seen through the prism of hoarding and consumption.
Economic ideas frame the debate regarding sexual hoarding which is the centrepiece of
Comus, while the History of Moscovia considers the ramifications of a national adoption of
the Lady’s compulsion to hoard. Of Reformation draws together the strands of hoarding
and consumption in the depiction of clergy who are, paradoxically, simultaneously
consumers and misers. In rejecting the excesses of the clergy, Milton constructs a model of
economic consumption which is neither ascetic nor libertine.
Rosemary Mundhenk has observed that ‘the appointment of [the Earl of]
Bridgewater as Lord President’ (1975, 143) is a crucial context for Comus, and the
economic significance of this is clear considering Bridgewater’s new duties included the
protection of trade monopolies in his jurisdiction (Skeel 1904, 147) and the hearing of
‘numerous private actions over debts and arrears in rent (which were due … at
Michaelmas, the date of the masque’s performance)’ (Hoxby 2002, 18). For Bridgewater,
then, Michaelmas was a day dedicated to economic matters, and Comus would be a fitting
culmination of such a day, as it explores the tenability of monopolies, both economic and
sexual.104
104
Welsh monopolies had been contested long before Bridgewater’s appointment. Under James I, ‘a
succession of speculators had secured and re-sold among themselves the monopoly of transporting 3000
barrels of Welsh butter annually for twenty-one years, at fixed prices, from any port in South Wales’ (Dodd
1942, 50). In 1617 there was heard in Parliament a ‘statement of the case of certain petitioners for licence to
export Welsh butter, when the price does not exceed 3d. per lb. in the summer, and 4d. in the winter. They
paid 500l. fine, and engaged to pay 300l. a year for their licence, but it is prevented passing the Privy Seal
and the Great Seal, by certain parties interested in opposing it. They urge its speedy completion’ (CSPD
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The tendency to elevate chastity to divine status is undermined by its
ineffectiveness in Comus, and Milton’s treatment of temperance also deviates from his
‘much neglected’ (Singleton 1943, 949) neo-Latin source, Erycius Puteanus’ Comus
(1608). In the earlier Comus, ‘sighting someone in the throng who looks like Epicurus,
Puteanus comments upon the falseness of that teaching which assigns the law of conduct to
pleasure instead of to virtue, and which seeks a sound authority for a bad thing by calling
gluttony and lust happiness’ (Singleton 1943, 951). This episode is absent in Milton’s
Comus, and one as classically erudite as Milton would surely have recognised that
Puteanus had misrepresented the Epicurean philosophy:
it is not continued drinkings and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or
feasts of fish and other such things, as a costly table supplies, that make life
pleasant, but sober contemplation, which examines into the reasons for all choice
and avoidance, and which puts to flight the vain opinions from which the greater
part of the confusion arises which troubles the soul. (Epicurus 1891, 471)
Milton redresses Puteanus’ distortion by making the eponymous character of his masque
more complex: while Comus enjoys drinking, revelry, and female society, his advocacy of
free economic circulation is tacitly endorsed by Milton. Steadfast virtue, which is
triumphant for Puteanus, is ineffective in the masque. Milton’s having matured beyond
Puteanus’ simplistic idealism is emphasised by his departure from Puteanus’ description of
Comus. While Puteanus describes Comus as ‘a tender and still immature lad’ (Puteanus
1973, 25), Milton’s Comus is ‘ripe, and frolick of his full grown age’ (l.59).
Comus’ first speech begins by referring to the evening star, the poles, and the
passage of the sun:
The Star that bids the Shepherd fold,
Now the top of Heav’n doth hold,
And the gilded Car of Day,
His glowing Axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantick stream,
And the slope Sun his upward beam
Shoots against the dusky Pole,
1653, 4:507). The Welsh butter monopoly remained in place until the 10 July 1621 ‘proclamation of the
King’s pleasure… licensing export of Welsh butter’(CSPD 1653, 4:274) which declared ‘that Butter may be
transported by all Men’(Tyrwhitt 1766, 102).
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Pacing towards the other gole
Of his Chamber in the East. (ll.93-101)
In the Renaissance, latitude was calculated by pointing a mariner’s astrolabe at the sun or a
star of known declination, and then the resulting angle was read off the instrument and
used to calculate position. ‘Steep’ and ‘slope’ evoke the angles used in these calculations,
while ‘the Star that bids the Shepherd fold’, Venus, the ‘gilded Car of Day’, the Sun, and
‘the dusky Pole,’ the North Star, were common points of reference.
The tropes of celestial navigation recur throughout the masque, as when the Elder
Brother implores
Unmuffle ye faint stars, and thou fair Moon
That wontsts to love the travailers benizon,
Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud,
And disinherit Chaos, that raigns here. (ll.331-4)
This ‘benizon’ reminds us of King Lear, where it connotes guidance proffered to the blind
Gloucester:
Edgar: Give me your hand:
I’ll lead you to some biding.
Gloucester: Hearty thanks:
The bounty and the benison of heaven (4.5.245-8)
Comus is persistently associated with darkness, as when he invokes ‘dun shades’ (l.127)
and ‘dark vaild Cotytto’ (l.129), which may seem to challenge the continuity of
navigational imagery. But this is not the case, as by the time Comus was written, shadows
were in fact becoming crucial for accurate navigation. The mariner’s astrolabe was
superseded by the backstaff, whose use was ‘altogether contrary’ to that of previous
instruments (J. Davis 1633, 56). The user was now required to stand with his back to the
sun, and calculate his latitudinal position according to the shadow cast:
the center of this staffe where the brasse plate is fastned, must be turned to that
parte of the Horizon which is from the Sunne, and with your backe toward the
Sunne, by the lower edge of the halfe crosse, and through the slitte of the plate you
must direct your sight onely to the Horizon, and then moving the transversary as
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occasion requireth, until the shadowe of your upper edge of the transversary doe
fall directly upon the saide slitte or long hole, and also at the same instant you see
the Horizon through the slitte, and then the transversary sheweth the height desired.
(J. Davis 1633, 56)
Tropes of navigation lead us to the imagery of spice, and Milton’s descriptions of
‘Hæmony’ (l.638) has much in common with contemporary accounts of ginger and pepper,
important exports from the East Indies. Milton’s source here appears to be Pierre de La
Primaudaye’s L'Academie Française (1601), a ‘prose compendium of scientific, moral,
and philosophical knowledge’ whose possible influence on Shakespeare has been noted
(Gillespie 2004, 277). Hæmony is a ‘small unsightly root’ (l.629) and its leaf ‘had prickles
on it’ (ll.631), just as ginger is a ‘root … which groweth not very high’ (La Primaudaye
1601, 319) and pepper leaves ‘are sharper at the end’ (La Primaudaye 1601, 321). Both
were used as protection against the plague; pepper was burnt in an attempt to ward off the
contagion (Kohn 2008, 227), while Nathaniel Hodges lauded ginger’s ability to ‘defend the
Spirits against the Pestilential Impression’ (1721, 164). Hæmony is ‘more med’cinal…
then that Moly / That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave’ (ll.636-7), itself notable for its
‘virtue’ (Homer 2002, 10.406), while Hæmony is ‘of sovran use / ‘Gainst all inchantments,
mildew blast, or damp / Or gastly furies apparition’ (ll.639-41). Homer’s description of
how ‘the root is hard to loose / From hold of earth by mortals, but god’s pow’r / Can all
things do’ (Homer 2002, 10.408-410) mirrors the way in which the Lady is ‘in stony fetters
fixt, and motionless’ (l.819). Moly cannot be dug up by mortals due to its godly virtue,
while the Lady is captive due to her virtue and cannot be freed except by the intervention
of Sabrina.
Milton invokes the conventional presentation of chastity as the greatest virtue in his
claim that
So dear to Heav'n is Saintly chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried Angels lacky her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt. (ll.453-6)
But in Comus chastity alone is ineffective and sin and guilt are only driven off by a
‘liveried Angel’ at the very end of the masque, and so ‘it is only after she has given a
convincing demonstration of her own moral self-sufficiency that the Lady receives, even
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indirectly, the help of heaven’ (Adams 1953, 22). Comus therefore delineates a concept of
chastity which would be more succinctly formulated in Areopagitica: ‘I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercisd & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her
adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not
without dust and heat’ (CPW 2:515). Milton goes on to cite a germane example from ‘our
sage and serious Poet Spencer,’ who, ‘describing true temperance under the person of
Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bowr of
earthly blisse that he might see and know, and yet abstain’ (CPW 2:516). This is precisely
what the Lady undergoes in Comus.
The commodification of chastity is enacted by the Brothers as much as Comus, as
the Second Brother expresses his fears for his sister’s safety in monetary terms:
You may as well spred out the unsun'd heaps
Of Misers treasure by an out-laws den,
And tell me it is safe, as bid me hope
Danger will wink on Opportunity,
And let a single helpless maiden pass
Uninjur’d in this wilde surrounding wast (ll.398-403)
By likening his sister to treasure the Second Brother identifies himself as the miser, ‘the
one who claims economic interest in maintaining the exchange value in his possession’
(Kim 1997, 8). The Lady’s ‘exchange value’ is her internal commodity, her chastity, and
the Elder Brother reminds us that ‘he that has light within his own cleer brest / May sit i’th
centre, and enjoy bright day’ (ll.381-2). The likening of chastity to an internal commodity
and the reference to ‘th centre’ of the earth invites a comparison to the mining passage
from Paradise Lost:
Men also, and by [Mammon’s] suggestion taught,
Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Op’nd into the Hill a spacious wound
And dig’d out ribs of Gold. (PL 1.685-90)105
105
Milton inverts the trope, common in contemporary tracts on mining, of personifying the earth as a
pregnant mother who needed to be delivered by miner-midwives. Thomas Bushell had petitioned James I that
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When transposed to Comus the metaphor becomes grossly sexual, as Comus’ ‘advice to
invade the earth matches his intent to invade the Lady’ (McColley 2007, 46). The Lady’s
‘Center’ is to be ‘ransack’d’ and her bowels ‘rifl’d’ to dig out the ‘Gold’ under her ribs. It
is an image of penetration, as ‘a spacious wound’ is to be opened into the Lady, yielding
her sexual treasure to ‘impious hands.’
Economic matters are most explicitly addressed in the central seduction scene,
which takes place in ‘a stately Palace, set out with all manner of deliciousness: soft
Musick, Tables spred with all dainties’ (l.658), anticipating the banquet scene in the
History of Moscovia, where the ‘store of gold and silver Plate excessive’ of the banquet
hall is supplemented by ‘a number … of rare dishes piled up by half dozens … of such
strangeness, greatness and goodness as scarce would be credible to report’ (CPW 8:530;
536).
Comus begins his address by developing the Second Brother’s equation of chastity
with treasure. He suggests that the Lady has become a miser like her brother, as to remain
virginal is to renege on the deal struck between her and Nature:
Why should you be so cruel to your self,
And to those dainty limms which nature lent
For gentle usage, and soft delicacy?
But you invert the cov’nants of her trust,
And harshly deal like an ill borrower
With that which you receiv’d on other terms (ll.679-84)
Comus opposes such hoarding, instead asserting that to live in accord with nature is to
consume without restraint, as he asks ‘wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth, /
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand … / But all to please, and sate the curious taste?’
(ll.710-11;714) Following Sir Epicure Mammon’s declaration in The Alchemist that ‘to live
recluse … is a mere solecism’ (4.1.101), Comus asserts that ascetics ‘live like Nature’s
bastards, not her sons’ (l.727). Moreover, they actually damage nature, as the earth is left
‘surcharg’d with her own weight / And strangl’d with her waste fertility’ (l.726-7).
‘those Mountains are as so many pregnant Wombs, and now in labour call for your fortunate hands to deliver
them.’ If the king did not allow men to ‘bring conceiled Treasures … into use,’ he risked leaving them ‘to the
worms of the earth, in whose womb those deserted Mineral riches must ever lie buried as lost abortments’
(Bushell 1659, 4, quoted in McColley 2007, 48).
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Comus’ argument foreshadows Satan’s apostrophe to the Tree of Knowledge
during Eve’s dream: ‘O fair plant … with fruit surcharged, / Deigns none to ease thy load,
and taste thy sweet ... / Is knowledge so despised? (PL 5.58-60). Comus analogously
defends the ethical tenability of mining, as he describes how the earth,
That no corner might
Be vacant of plenty in her own loins …
Hutched the all-worshipped ore and precious gems
To store her children with. (ll.717-20)
This is similar to Georgius Agricola’s defence of mining in De re metallica (1556), where
he declares ‘the earth does not conceal metals in her depths because she does not wish that
men should dig them out, but because provident and sagacious nature hath appointed for
each thing its place’ (1912, 12). Comus goes on to imagine the damaging effects of a lack
of mining, which would cause
Th’unsought diamonds
Would so emblaze the forhead of the Deep,
And so bestudd with Stars, that they below
Would grow inur’d to light, and com at last
To gaze upon the Sun with shameless brows. (ll.732-6)
Here, Comus articulates the ‘general scientific position of seventeenth century
mineralogists’ (D. C. Allen 1949, 180) as represented in Anselmus Boëtius’ seminal work
Gemmarum et lapidum historia (1609), which claimed that an exhausted diamond mine
would replenish itself if left fallow for two years (Boëtius 1636, 121). The concern with
overburdening of untrafficked commodities, and unsought diamonds in particular, was also
expressed in Lewes Roberts’ The Treasure of Traffike (1641) as he discusses the problem
which would afflict
those rich Kingdomes of India, some years past, by their great quantity of spices,
drugs, and jemmes, which, not by the Commodity of Traffike, carried thence away,
exported and vented into other parts, and to remoter Countries: these excellencies
which nature herein afforded them, would be prejudiciall to them, and their ground
over-laid with sundry (though otherwise) excellent trees, and exquisite Minerals,
whose fruit or worth would thus not be requested nor sought after. (1641, 8-9)
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While Mammon luxuriates in the ‘magnificence’ (PL 2.272) of accumulated wealth,
Comus subscribes to Bacon’s belief that ‘money is like muck: not good except it be
spread’ (1985, 105). Recasting the carpe diem in economic form, Comus describes beauty
as ‘nature’s coyn’ (l.739), and so the Lady’s commodification becomes literal. While such
objectification may seem crass, it follows the précis of economic development offered by
Misselden’s Circle of Commerce: ‘by degrees all things came to bee valued with money,
and mony the value of all things’ (1623, 94). Comus embodies the tendency towards
universal commodification, as he ‘reduces everything to cash terms. Beauty and morality
are degraded to commodities, to cash, and the language of capitalism is the language in
which he presents them’ (Wilding 1987, 69).
Comus goes on to argue that
Beauty is nature’s coyn, must not be hoorded,
But must be currant, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partak’n bliss,
Unsavoury in th’injoyment of it self.
If you let slip time, like a neglected rose
It withers on the stalk with languish’t head. (ll.739-44)106
This emphasis on the necessity of circulation, while anticipating Locke’s belief that it is
the ‘current of money which turns the wheels of trade’ (1991, 2:224), also owes much to
the economic thinkers of the early 1620s (Hoxby 2002, 20). The economic carpe diem
argument occurs in Mun’s Discourse of Trade:
would men have us to keepe our woods and goodly trees to looke upon? They
might aswell forbid the working of our woolls, & sending forth our cloth to forren
parts; for both are meanes alike to procure the necessarie wares, which this
Kingdome wanteth. Doe they not know that trees doe live and grow; and being
106
These lines are not present in the text used for the initial performance of Comus, known as the
Bridgewater Manuscript. In the manuscript, Comus’ speech ends at ‘to gaze upon the Sun with shameless
brows’ (Milton 1943 1:331). The three years between the performance and publication of Comus allowed
Milton to add nuance the debate between the eponymous character and the Lady. The connections between
Comus and contemporary discussions of national economic policy are supported by Cedric C. Brown’s
argument that ‘the alterations made [to Comus] for publication are visibly in the spirit of the poet of Lycidas:
they show a growing determination to take opportunities to speak out to the nation, in something approaching
prophetic address’ (Brown 1985, 8).
103
great, they have a time to dye and rot, if opportunity make no better use of them?
(1621, 28)
Christopher Kendrick claims that Comus offers a ‘voluptuous, neo-aristocratic argument
for temperance’ (1987, 65), but Comus clearly has no interest in temperance. He explicitly
disparages the idea, claiming that
If all the world
Should in a pet of temperance feed on Pulse,
Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but Frieze,
Th’all-giver would be unthank’t, would be unprais’d. (ll.720-3)
Rather, it is the Lady who urges temperance, describing Nature as a ‘good cateress’ who
‘means her provision onely to the good / That live according to her sober laws, / And holy
dictate of spare Temperance’ (ll.764-7). Analogously, while defending the East India
Company against the claim that domestic food prices were raised by the sailors’ excessive
consumption of food and drink, Mun asserts that their supplies are ‘proportioned into a
very sparing dyet to every man by allowance: so that here is no excesse nor ryot, or any
other meanes to make our victuals scant and deare, as is by some erroneously supposed;
but rather by this course of life, our plenty is much advanced’ (1621, 34).
The economic debate which Milton conducts in Comus serves two functions.
Initially, the masque follows generic conventions by criticising the unchecked appetite of
its eponymous character. But Milton deviates from convention when he attacks the
propensity to hoard which is demonstrated by the Lady and her Brothers. These characters
seek to enforce a fixity which is incompatible with the dynamism which was, as was
becoming apparent, essential to effective economic interactions. The middle path Milton
proposes, between the Lady’s chaste isolation and Comus’ belief that Nature covered the
earth with odours, fruits, and flocks … all to please, and sate the curious taste’ (ll.712; 714)
is expressed by Mun’s asking ‘who is so ignorant … [that] will not consent to the moderate
use of wholesome Drugges and comfortable Spices … not thereby to surfeit, or to please a
lickorish taste …, but rather as things most necessary to preserve their health, and to cure
their diseases?’ (1621, 4) The sexuality-economics metaphor which underpins the masque
was prevalent at the time – Misselden described how ‘the Cloth-trade is the Dowry of the
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Kingdome’ (1623, 63) – and Milton draws on this equation to advocate not isolated
exclusivity, nor indiscriminate promiscuity, but a considered economic polygamy.
Hoxby remarks that
It is certainly remarkable to see how nearly Milton converges on Comus’s
arguments for economic and sexual circulation in his tracts of the 1640s: the Lady’s
concern with abstention and distribution gives way to the pamphleteer’s
investigation of the processes of circulation, commerce, and generation; an ethic of
sexual hoarding gives way to an ideal of chaste sexuality governed by dissoluble
(and potentially multiple) marriage contracts. (2002, 24)
While Hoxby astutely suggests the connection between Comus and Milton’s views
regarding polygamy, he neglects to explore the economic manifestation of polygamy in the
masque. Polygamy was evidently on Milton’s mind shortly after the performance of
Comus, as two of the three citations on the subject in his commonplace book – Justin
Martyr’s observation that ‘the polygamy of the ancient Jews was by no means forbidden’
(CPW 1:397) and that ‘Valentinian sanctioned bigamy by law’ (CPW 1:400) – are dated
between 1634 and 1638. Milton’s familiarity with Justin Martyr is of particular interest
here, as the latter understood patriarchal polygamy as follows:
The marriages of Jacob were types of that which Christ was about to accomplish.
For it was not lawful for Jacob to marry two sisters at once. And he serves Laban
for [one of] the daughters; and being deceived in [the obtaining of] the younger, he
again served seven years. Now Leah is your people and synagogue; but Rachel is
our church. (Justin Martyr 1867, 2:269)
In the same way, the Lady and Comus represent the extremes of the old and new economic
models. The Lady embodies the obsessive loyalty and jealous guarding of exclusive
monopolies, while Comus manifestats the indiscriminate consumption which was feared
would be the consequence of removing monopolistic safeguards. Instead, Milton suggests
a mode of economic interaction based on pragmatism and consumption for a purpose. The
bigamy and polygamy of the biblical patriarchs was similarly motivated not by
concupiscence, but the need for children; Abram and Jacob are polygynous because their
first wives are barren (Gen. 16:1-2; Gen. 30:1-5). Augustine considered the case of Jacob,
and concluded that since ‘he used the women not for sensual gratification, but for the
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procreation of children’ (Augustine 1871, 5:438), he was blameless.107 Grotius, whose
arguments on free trade in Mare liberum (1609) influenced Milton’s advocacy of the free
circulation of ideas, argued that polygamy was in accordance with natural law (2005,
1:195).
While Milton’s beliefs regarding polygamy were taking shape during the 1630s,
seventeenth century literary representations of the practice tended to either satirical
derision, or cautious advocacy. The former may be seen in the opening of Dryden’s
Absalom and Achitophel:
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin,
When man on many multiplied his kind
Ere one to one was cursedly confined;
When nature prompted, and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride. (1995, 1:454)
But more positive representations of circulation, whether sexual or economic, are found
directly contemporary with Comus (Sensabaugh 1944, 240), such as William Cartwright’s
The Royall Slave (1636). In Cartwright’s play, Atossa defends herself from her husband’s
accusation of infidelity by asserting
Love is as free as Fountaine, Aire, or Flower
For’t stands not in a poynt; ‘tis large, and may
Like streams give verdure to this Plant that Tree,
Nay that whole field of Flow’rs, and yet still runne
In a most faithfull course toward the bosome
Of the lov’d Ocean. (Cartwright 1639, 3.5.22-27)
So while Milton’s beliefs regarding polygamy were not crystallised until the composition
of the Christian Doctrine, which is ‘likely to have been brought to its present condition at
or around 1660’ (Campbell et al. 2007a, 157), they are nevertheless taking shape in the
107
As Leo Miller’s Milton among the Polygamophiles (1974) reminds us, polygamy was far from universally
condemned in Milton’s time. In 1598 Alberico Gentili was uncertain about Solomon’s polygamy, concluding
that ‘neither our most learned nor our most polished theologians satisfy me’ (1933, 2:373, quoted in Miller
1974, 51). In a curious connection, Gentili’s tract devoted to considering the legality of polygamy,
Disputationum de nuptiis libri VII (1609) was dedicated to Thomas Egerton, father of John Egerton, the first
Earl of Bridgewater for whom Comus was performed.
106
1630s. The Christian Doctrine defends polygamy on the grounds that ‘no trace of the
censure of polygamy can be seen throughout the whole law’ (CPW 6:360), and Comus too
argues against possessiveness which has no basis in law, natural or divine. When Milton
wrote his masque he was becoming increasingly convinced that a return to a freer, primal
mode of economic intercourse was necessary, because, as Misselden observed, ‘trade hath
in it such a kinde of naturall liberty in the course and use thereof, as it will not indure to be
fors’t by any’ (1623, 112).
Much ink has been spilt concerning the precise function of the History of Moscovia,
which is rooted in contentions about its date of composition. Although not published until
1682, the Moscovia is generally considered one of Milton’s earliest texts, not least because
Milton’s commonplace book entries for one of Moscovia’s main historiographical sources,
Samuel Purchas’s Purchas, his Pilgrimage (1625), exhibits ‘orthographical practices …
which are not in evidence from his hand after the middle of 1644’ (Shawcross 1974, 365).
Contrary to Milton’s claim that he collected what was ‘scatter’d in many Volumes’ (CPW
8:475), the Moscovia actually draws almost exclusively on only two texts, Purchas’s
Purchas, his Pilgrimage and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1600).
Consequently, John Gleason has observed that ‘so small is the volume of material drawn
upon … that the Moscovia could have been compiled in a week’ (1964, 642). Such a short
period of compilation renders precise dating rather problematic, leading James Hanford to
propose somewhat loosely that it was written ‘at some interval of leisure during the
Commonwealth or Early Protectorate … possibly even as early as the Horton period
[1632-8]’ (1946, 129). Lloyd Berry dates the Moscovia to the Horton period in light of the
‘pervasive influence of Giles Fletcher’s Russe Common Wealth on Milton's conception of
Russia’ (Berry 1960, 150). In the mid-1630s Milton was evidently familiar with the
writings of Phineas Fletcher, son of Giles, and clear parallels exist between Giles’s De
literis antiquae britanniae and Comus (Bradner 1940, 39), while Lycidas shows evidence
of influence from both Giles’s Latin elegies (Austin 1947, 55) and the Russe Common
Wealth (Berry 1960, 155).
The dating of the Moscovia to the Horton period is supported by Milton’s comment
in his preface: ‘and this perhaps induc'd Paulus Jovius to describe onely Muscovy and
Britain. Some such thoughts, many years since, led me at a vacant time to attempt the like
argument; and I began with Muscovy, as being the most northern Region of Europe reputed
civil; and the more northern Parts thereof, first discovered by English Voiages (CPW 8:
107
474-5). Berry continues: ‘since Milton himself tells us that he began with Muscovy and
since upon his return to England in 1639 he began his intensive reading for the History of
Britain, we can safely conclude that the “vacant time” preceded the composition of the
History of Britain; and the only “vacant time” preceding its composition was the Horton
period’ (Berry 1960, 156)S.
Berry’s dating is not without its problems, however. Shawcross observes that
‘Milton was not reading the kind of material before 1639 that is compiled in [the
Moscovia]’ (1974, 365), while the only three citations of Purchas in Milton’s
Commonplace Book date between 1642 and 1644 (Mohl 1969, 13). It is clear, then, that
while it is not possible to date the Moscovia with absolute accuracy, it seems most
plausible to place it in the early 1640s.
The nature of future disagreements between England and Russia was hinted at
during the very first mercantile encounter between the nations, when the Russians refused
to trade ‘without first the consent had of their King’ (CPW 8:526). The first Romanovs
‘ascended the throne [in 1613] after a period of great troubles, experienced a want of ready
money, and regarded customs paid by foreigners as a very important source for
replenishing their treasury’(Lubimenko 1928, 44). Trade relations between England and
Russia grew more strained as the century progressed, and ‘the first news of the English
revolution in 1642 had given a convenient pretext to begin the attack, which was continued
during the next years’ (Lubimenko 1928, 44).
The Russians dispatched an urgent envoy to seek an audience with the king, which
was repeatedly refused by Parliament on the messenger’s arrival in London (Lubimenko
1928, 43). Ideological opposition to the political situation in England coalesced with
discontent about the trading privileges granted to English merchants, and the Russian
government consequently revoked English trading privileges. This led a group of English
merchants to complain that ‘the trade has been unquestioned one hundred years, in spite of
revolutions of Emperors, till in 1646 Alexis Michaelowich took away our privileges,
imposed large customs on us, and seized goods of grate value by fraud’ (CSPD 1653: 340).
The Russian merchants were still not appeased, and in early 1649, 164 deputies of
Russian towns submitted a petition to the Tsar asking foreigners to be prevented from
trading in the country. On 1 June 1649, the Tsar, ostensibly due solely to his anger at the
regicide, issued a proclamation banning all English merchants from the interior of Russia.
As in England, then, we see politics and protectionism intertwine, and Lubimenko is right
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to observe that in such matters, ‘economic reasons were … at least as important as political
ones’ (1928, 49).
Berry has identified two dominant thematic strands running through the History of
Moscovia: ‘Milton's pride in the accomplishments of the English people and the system of
government, so unlike that of Russia, which fostered these accomplishments… [and]
contempt for the Russian people’ (1960, 151). Milton was far from unique in this regard;
he merely reflected the attitudes of his time. Robert Cawley has noted that we find in
Milton the ‘note of condescension toward Muscovia shared by so many of his countrymen’
(1965, 40), but his comments are ‘relatively restrained and judicious’ (Bedford 1993, 77).
A representative example of the European attitudes towards Muscovy may be found in
Pierre D’Avity’s The Estates, Empires, & Principallities of the World, translated into
English in 1615. Avity describes how the Russians are ‘so barbarous and trecherous, as
there is not any plainnesse or sinceritie to be found among them; and their naturall
disposition is so bad, as you shall never see any firme love or frindship among them, yea
they keepe no faith with them to whom they have promised it, neither have they any
respect of parentage or alliance’ (1615, 691).
This incivility, Avity claims, is particularly evident in their mercantile conduct:
They are as subtile and deceitfull as can be, and in all their bargaines they have still
some tricke and double understanding, with the which they seeke to abuse one
another, and to find meanes to breake their contracts, and to interpret them after
their owne fancies: and it is a thing so common among them, and so well knowne,
as they finding themselves blemished with this vice, faine themselves to be no
Muscovites, whenas they are to deale with any strangers, or would traffique with
them. (1615, 691)
Economic concerns are similarly central to the Moscovia, and Berry’s claim that Milton is
uninterested in ‘mercantile expansion’ (1960, 81) in the text is inaccurate. Milton explicitly
acknowledges that mercantile interests were the fundamental motivation of the initial
expedition:
When our Merchants perceiv’d the Commodities of England to be in small request
abroad, and foreign merchandize to grow higher in esteem and value than before,
they began to think with themselves how this might be remedied. And seeing how
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the Spaniards and Portugals had encreas’d their wealth by discovery of new Trades
and Countries, they resolv’d upon some new and strange Navigation. (CPW 8:524)
While Milton was keen to depict his countrymen in a flattering light, he is forced to
concede that the expedition ‘might have seem’d an enterprise almost heroick; if any higher
end than the excessive love of Gain and Traffick, had animated the design’ (CPW 8:524).
Similarly, Francis Bacon lamented that the ‘princes and nobles of Europe’ had
Made a great path in the seas unto the ends of the world; and set forth ships and
forces of Spanish, English, and Dutch, enough to make China tremble; and all this
for pearl, or stone, or spices: but for the pearl of the kingdom of heaven, or the
stones of the heavenly Hierusalem, or the spices of a spouse’s garden, not a mast
hath been set up. (Bacon 1863, 13:193–4)
Such ignobly motivated explorers reappear in the History of Britain, although Milton’s
historiographical approach in the latter text is much more sophisticated than in the
Moscovia. One immediately apparent difference between the two texts is that the
Moscovia wholly ‘ignore[s]’ the wealth of ‘literature on Russia in western languages,
especially Latin and Italian (Gleason 1964, 642), in contrast to the relative
historiographical diligence of the History of Britain. Cawley’s proposition that the
Moscovia ‘carefully select[s]… material from eyewitnesses and thus correct[s]
geographers who have written slavishly in the tradition’ (Cawley 1965, 6) is flawed.
Whereas the History of Britain ‘carefully examines and criticises its sources before
adopting or rejecting their testimony’ (Gleason 1964, 641), the Moscovia slavishly
replicates its sources without any interrogation of their credibility, as ‘no one seems to
have asked… whether the eyewitnesses were truthful, well-informed, conscientious. The
Moscovia never raises such questions but uses every kind of assertion indiscriminately’
(Gleason 1964, 641).
While Gleason offers a refreshing corrective to Cawley’s adulation, his own
reading is not without its problems. He criticises Milton because ‘about five per cent of the
entire book is devoted to a single incident, an altercation in which the English ambassador
defied Ivan the Terrible… its occupying a twentieth of the whole Moscovia seems to place
Milton himself squarely among those who have “miss'd their proportions”’ (Gleason 1964,
641). However, the fundamental thesis of Gleason’s essay is that the Moscovia is ‘an
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abandoned project never intended by Milton for publication’ (1964, 641), and it therefore
seems unreasonable to criticise the unevenness of an unfinished text.
In spite of its incomplete state, the Moscovia still possesses a degree of thematic
continuity. The text opens with a description of the Bay of St Nicholas, the site of the first
English landing in Russia. Milton’s description of a nearby abbey ‘wherein are 20 monks;
unlearned … and great drunkards: their church is fair, full of Images, and Tapers’ (CPW
8:477) foreshadows the monastic depravity which permeates the rest of the text, as
‘Russian religion is virtually paganism contrasted with English Protestantism’ (Cawley
1970, 56). Spiritual debauchery is accompanied by agricultural infertility, as the land
surrounding the monastery is ‘so barren, that the inhabitants fetch their corn a 1000 miles’
(CPW 8:477), evoking Hell’s ‘dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde’ (PL 1.180).
The Moscovia persistently associates monks with barrenness and perversity, so
Milton emphasises the sudden proliferation of natural wealth in their absence. The river
Petzora ‘abound[s] with Swans, Ducks, Geese, and Partridge’ (CPW 8:479), while ‘the
Country is so fertile, so populous and full of villages, that in a forenoon 7 or 800 sleds are
usually seen coming with Salt Fish, or laden back with Corn’ (CPW 8:483). Bedford’s
claim that Milton does not ‘seem to be interested in recording the natural products of
Russia’ (1993, 82) seems dubious considering that in just a few pages Milton mentions
timber, iron, swans, ducks, geese, partridges, corn, salt fish, and sturgeon (CPW 8:4785).108 The proliferation of natural wealth is accompanied by simple economic conduct, as
the people in these areas ‘salt the Bodies [of the birds] for Winter Provision’ (CPW 8:479)
or exchange salt fish for corn. They exhibit temperance instead of greed, and do not
stockpile excessive quantities of food or gold, which Milton believed was unnatural as
‘nature’s coin’ was ‘unsavoury in th’ enjoyment of itself’ (Comus l.739; 742).
The sense of equilibrium is soon destabilised by the description of Astracan, a town
in which ‘the houses except that of the Governor’s, and some few others, [are] poor and
simple’ (CPW 8:485). The relationship between injustice and infertility established by the
description of the abbey at the Bay of St Nicholas is also manifested in Astracan, where the
ground is ‘utterly barren, and without wood’ (CPW 8:485). Class inequality is reflected by
physical corruption, as the sturgeon ‘hanging up to dry in the Streets and Houses [bring]
108
Considering how many commodities Milton enumerates here, it is strange that the Moscovia makes no
mention of fur. In the seventeenth century, the Russian fur trade ‘provid[ed] a lion’s share of the state’s
disposable income, … [and] played its role in financing military campaigns, diplomatic activities, and even
religious treatises of the state’ (Etkind 2011, 81).
111
whole swarms of flies, and infection to the Aire, and oft great Pestilence’ (CPW 8:485),
evoking the Satanic connotations of ‘Beelzebub’, etymologically rooted in the Hebrew
Ba’al Zəbûb, meaning ‘lord of the flies’ (Balz 1996, 211). The connection to the corrupt
monks is reiterated when we learn that one of their favourite foods are ‘noysom Fish’
(CPW 8:495).
‘At least 200 monks’ (CPW 8:486) live in a large monastery near Novgorod, which
is ‘the greatest Mart-town in all this dominion’ (CPW 8:486). The monks are ‘as great
Merchants as any in the land’ (CPW 8:493), yet there are ‘for whordom, drunkenness, and
Extortion none worse’ (CPW 8:492). Milton describes them as ‘great Talkers, Lyars,
Flatterers and dissemblers’ (CPW 8:495), and so it is unsurprising that the Novgorodians
who are ‘tenants to these monks’ (CPW 8:486), are ‘savages’ (CPW 8:486).
Novgorod realises many of Milton’s fears regarding the abuse of monarchical,
jurisprudential, and ecclesiastical authority. In the city, ‘justice by corruption of inferior
officials is much perverted’ (CPW 8:489) and the emperor ‘exerciseth absolute power’
(CPW 8:487). This incontestable authority removes any obstruction to the rapacious
avarice of the emperor, and consequently
the revenues of the emperor are what he list… he omits not the coarsest means to
raise them … in any good town there is a drunken Tavern … which the Emperor
either lets out to farm or bestows on some Duke or Gentleman in reward of his
Service; who for that time is lord of the whole Town, robbing and spoiling at his
pleasure; till being well enricht, he is sent on his own charge to the Wars, and
squeezed of his ill-got wealth. (CPW 8:489)
This description of a monarch exploiting his autocracy to raise revenues suggests a parallel
to Charles I’s struggles with Parliament, and Cawley has noted that ‘possibly there is some
reflection … of needed reforms at home in what [Milton] writes of money-raising’ (1965,
34). Such a connection is illuminated by the fact that the expeditions described in the
Moscovia occurred in the latter half of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Ivan the
Terrible. Many of Ivan’s actions were motivated by fears of domestic opponents who
might threaten his autocracy, and he implemented a centralised economic framework
which rendered ‘entire communities responsible to central apparatus’ (J. Martin 2008,
386). Like Charles, Ivan pursued his imperialist interests by engaging in costly wars which
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crippled the Russian economy, and sought to replenish the royal coffers through
extortionate taxation. The amount collected in taxes from Russian peasants ‘rose
dramatically during the sixteenth century’ (J. Martin 2008, 405), and this is particularly
apparent during Ivan’s reign: in 1533, the peasants were taxed on average 9.5 rubles per
bol-shaia sokha [area of land owned], while by 1561 it had risen to 22 rubles, far above the
normal rate of inflation (Zlotnik 1979, 253).
The Russian passion for amassing vast quantities of gold is particularly evident in
Novgorod. While Novgorod is ‘the greatest Mart-town in all this dominion’, Milton’s
description of the town does not mention a single commodity. Attention is paid instead to
the stockpiled gold which was so ardently desired by Misselden and Mun’s opponents. The
profusion of gold is such that even soldiers’ uniforms are covered with ‘cloth of gold, for
they desire to be gorgeous in arms, but the Duke himself above measure: his pavilion
covered with cloth of gold, or silver, set with precious stones’ (CPW 8:490). This lack of
continence is mirrored in the way that they ‘fight without order’ (CPW 8:490).
While the Duke arrays his soldiers in gold, the poor of Novgorod are not so well treated:
There are no people who live so miserably as the Poor of Russia; if they have Straw
and Water they make shift to live; for Straw dry’d and stampt in Winter time is
their Bread; in Summer Grass and Roots; at all times Bark of Trees is good meat
with them; yet many of them die in the Street for hunger, none relieving or
regarding them. (CPW 8:495)
This forms a stark contrast with the provisions of the monks, who ‘delight in gross Meats
and noysom Fish, their drink is better, being sundry sorts of Meath’ (CPW 8:495).
It is in the court of Moscow, however, that the most potent manifestation of
covetousness is found, as the entire last chapter of the Moscovia is devoted to a discussion
of the lavish receptions and ceremonies witnessed by English ambassadors. The Muscovite
obsession with gold is developed to the point of absurdity, as in the description of the
emperor himself, who ‘was invested with an upper robe so thick with gold, orient pearls
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and stones as weighed 200 pounds’ (CPW 8:515). 109 This obscene profusion of riches is
further emphasised in the description of a banquet at which there was
a very honourable company to the number of a hunder’d sitting all apparell’d in
Cloth gold down to their Ancles … there sate the Emperour … on his Head a
Diadem of gold, his Robe all of Goldsmiths work, in his Hand a Chrystal Sceptre
garnish’d and beset with precious Stones … beside him stood his chief Secretary,
on his other side the great Commander of silence, both in Cloth of gold; then sate
his council of 150 round about on high seats, clad all as richly. (CPW 8:527)
Even the servants are ‘likewise arrayed in gold’ (CPW 8:528), but a ten-page description of
the banquet hall concludes with an almost cursory reference to ‘a number … of rare dishes
piled up by half dozens … of such strangeness, greatness and goodness as scarce would be
credible to report’ (CPW 8:536). Even the victuals of the Christmas Day feast are
overlooked, as Milton instead focuses on the ‘store of gold and silver Plate excessive’
(CPW 8:530). This attitude is concisely represented by the fact that the centrepiece of the
feasting hall was ‘a Pillar heap’d round to a great height with massy Plate curiously
wrought with Beasts, Fishes, and Fowl’ (CPW 8:536); the Russians have no interest in
perishable items such as food, and so the traditional banquet centrepiece of lavish cuisine
is replaced by a more lasting golden representation. Milton too pays little attention to
consumable items, focusing instead on the stockpiled gold which was invested with such
permanent and potent status by bullionists. His account of the Muscovite court prioritises
aurulent magnificence, and by emphasising the golden items in his written account, he
reiterates the bullionist reification of the permanent value of gold.
Leaving Moscow, Milton describes the borders of northern Cathay, where ‘the fair
prospect of the country is replenished with many rare trees, plants and flowers, beasts and
fowl’ (CPW 8:505). In the country itself, however, the proximity of the temptations of
avarice and sin is given its most literal articulation when Milton asserts ‘the people are
idolators; the country exceeding fruitful’ (CPW 8:509).
The cities of Cathay are the most splendiferous of the Moscovia, as Shirskalya
‘abounds with merchandise, velvets, damasks, cloth of gold and tissue, with many sorts of
sugar. Like to this is the city Yora; their markets smell odiferously with spices’ (CPW
109
The crushing weight of the emperor’s robe ‘thick with gold [and] orient pearls’ recalls the Anemolian
ambassadors in Utopia, who wear ‘caps which glistered full of pearles’ and are ‘adorned with massie
chaines’ which the Utopians recognise as ‘the punishment of bondmen’ (More 1639, 172-173).
114
8:509). In the imperial city ‘stands a Castle build of Magnet, where the King dwels, in a
sumptuous Palace, the top whereof is overlaid with Gold’ (CPW 8:509).110 This magnetism
reiterates the connections between Moscovia and the spice trade: the journey of
acquisitiveness traced in the text is inexorably drawn towards the east, concluding with a
palace built on spice and crowned with gold, the ultimate goal towards which the
Europeans strived.
One of the most notable characteristics of the Moscovia is the omnipresence of
gold. While commodities themselves are found in varying quantities, there is a constant
golden thread running through the text which grows ever thicker. This reflects the ideal
bullionist trajectory: commodities are obtained and possess value only insofar as they can
be exchanged for gold, which is added to an ever larger stockpile. The Moscovia traces a
nation’s gradual evolution into a hyper-bullionist state.
The criticisms of Russia which are found in the text – religious corruption and
economic inequality – are causally rooted in both the tyranny of its spiritual and secular
authorities and its bullionist obsession with gold. Cawley has noted that one of the primary
differences between Milton and his sources is the emphasis on ‘the human interest’ (1965,
38), and the Moscovia thus becomes not a detached survey of a foreign nation, but an
impassioned indictment of the human consequences of bullionism.
While Hong-Won Suh argues that Of Reformation (1641) is notable for its ‘glaring
lack of admission that [Milton's] contributions to the struggle against prelacy are belated’
(2000, 24), the seeds of Milton’s antiprelatism can in fact be found in the anticatholicism
of his early poetry. On the Fifth of November (1626) characterises the Pope as a ‘secretive
adulterer’ who ‘does not / pass unproductive nights without a gentle whore’ (ll. 75-6), and
Lycidas (1637) attacks avaricious priests,
Such as for their bellies sake,
Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold.
110
Milton’s source for this passage, Purchas’s Pilgrimes, describes the imperial castle being ‘built of Magnet,
or Load-stone’ (Purchas 1625, 3:801). Neither Purchas nor Milton provide any further information about the
peculiarity of a castle being built of lodestone. Nevertheless, China’s connections to magnetism were known
in Milton’s time, as William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600), the first work to conclude that the Earth was
magnetic, noted that ‘if those things be true which are told about the people of China, neither were they in
primitive times ignorant of magnetic experiments, for even in their country are seen the most excellent
magnets in the world’ (Gilbert 1958, 16-17). Gilbert goes on to claim that ‘knowledge of the mariner’s
compass appears to have been brought into Italy by the Venetian Paolo [Marco Polo] who about the year
1260 learned the art of the compass in China’ (Gilbert 1958, 6-7). I have found no mention of an imperial
castle built of lodestone in De Magnete, or in any other contemporary accounts of China.
115
Of other care they little reck’ning make,
Ten how to scramble at the shearers feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest. (ll. 114-118)
Milton’s early poetic depictions of a debauched and devouring clergy inform his later
antiprelatism. Lycidas, like Of Reformation, characterises the excesses of the clergy in
terms of consumption. The priests are reduced to grotesquely gorging ‘blind mouthes’ (l.
119) and their greed starves the flock, as the ‘hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed’ (l.
125). The starved flock are also ‘swoln with wind, and the rank mist’ (l. 126); while the
priests’ care is ostensibly nourishing, the flock ‘rot inwardly’ (l. 127). For Milton, the
prelates’ holiness is a mere pretence, and this insubstantiality is evident in both On the
Fifth of November, where the ‘droning of chanters / continually fills the hollow domes and
empty spaces’ (ll. 62-3), and in Lycidas, where the flock are ‘blown bagpipes for the fiend
to pipe with’ (Ruskin 1905, 18:74).111 The diabolical connection drawn here by Ruskin is
supported by the persistent Satanic connotations of mist throughout Paradise Lost, as when
‘Satan involv’d in rising Mist, then sought / Where to lie hid’ (PL 9.75-6).
Lycidas is not unremittingly bleak, however, as it concludes on a note of
redemptive optimism. Milton hopes for the return of the eponymous shepherd to watch
over his wayward flock, as he reminds us that
Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his dropping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. (ll. 166-71)
Lycidas is identified with the sun, and most crucially, his ‘new-spangled Ore’; a
connection of mining and soteriology which is made explicit when Lycidas is reborn
‘through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves’ (l. 173). The reference to ‘Ore’ and
the allusion to Jesus in the latter quotation reiterate the connections Milton draws between
consumption and salvation. He perhaps had in mind here the other definitions of ‘ore’ in
111
Interestingly, Ruskin was ‘one of the great numismatists’ (Shell 1993, 70).
116
use up to the fifteenth century, where the term meant ‘grace’ and ‘was common in Middle
English in appeals to God.’112
Lycidas embodies the transfiguration of individual to national salvation which
recurs throughout Milton’s canon, and so it shares more with Of Reformation than mere
antiprelatical vitriol: ‘in the antiprelatical tracts Milton attempts to transfer the poetic
vision of the apotheosis of the regenerate man to the reforming historical situation of
England. The visionary consolation of Lycidas ... is transmuted to the compensation of
regenerate reform in the present time’ (Via 1973, 123). Of Reformation exhibits further
influence from Lycidas in its vivaciously poetic turn of phrase. It combines scurrilous smut
with elevated apocalypticism, and Everett Emerson has noted that ‘Milton's attacks on the
bishops manifest the qualities that make his prose so great: an exploitation of the full
resources of English from the poetic to the subliterary; striking images; concise, powerful,
often highly sensuous phrases; packed, sprawling sentences’ (1967, 38).
It has been suggested that the antiprelatical tracts are characterised by ‘a pervading
concept of harmony, radiant unity, [and] decorum’ (Kranidas 1965, 185), but this is
patently not the case. I concede that some of the later antiprelatical tracts, and The Reason
of Church-Government (1642) in particular, are tightly controlled, but Of Reformation
could never be described as harmonious, unified, and decorous. Rather, it is a vividly
diffuse text which possesses an ‘opulence of the graphic which might well be called
unpruned’ (Ekfelt 1946, 66).
Thomas Corns argues that ‘the early fixations of [Milton’s] political prose are
wholly with religious concerns’ (2009, 40), but the language of economics is in fact
present from the outset in Of Reformation. Milton describes the ‘Doctrine of the Gospel’
being ‘planted by teachers Divinely inspir’d, and by them winnow’d, and sifted, from the
chaffe of over-dated Ceremonies’ (CPW 1:519). The gospel begins as a raw material which
is then worked by manufacture, and thus increased in value. The economic connotations of
this image are developed in metallurgical terms, as the gospel is ‘refin’d to such a
Spirituall height, and temper of purity, and knowledge of the Creator, that the body, with
all the circumstances of time and place, were purifi’d by the affections of the regenerat
112
"ore, n.1". OED Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132378?rskey=LFcppY&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed September
25, 2013). A representative example is Saint Editha’s Chronicon Vilodunense (1450), which implores
‘blessude virgyn, y crie ȝow mercy & hore / & beseche ȝow to forȝeue me now þis mysdede’ (1883, 110).
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Soule’ (CPW 1:519). We see a connection drawn here between the ‘regenerat Soule’ and
metallurgical ‘refin[ement]’; Milton again imbricates economics and salvation.
He recalls to his readers the time when ‘Faith need[ed] not the weak, and fallible
office of the Senses, to be either the Ushers, or Interpreters, of heavenly Mysteries’ (CPW
1:519), but now Milton has no choice but to conceptualise spiritual matters in physical
terms. The worldliness of the church has long ‘draw[n] downe all the Divine intercourse,
betwixt God, and the Soule, yea, the very shape of God himselfe, into an exterior, and
bodily forme’ (CPW 1:519), rendered absurd by In Quintum Novembris’ description of
‘gods made out of bread’ (l. 55). The gospel consequently ‘forgot her heavenly flight, and
left the dull, and droyling carcas to plod on in the old rode, and drudging Trade of outward
conformity’ (CPW 1:522).
Consumption becomes comestible, as ‘gods made out of bread’ become ministers
made out of stew, ‘who no sooner advanc’t to [episcopacy], but like a seething pot set to
coole, sensibly exhale and reake out the greatest part of that zeale, and those Gifts which
were formerly in them, settling in a skinny congealment of ease and sloth at the top’ (CPW
1:536). This evokes the idiom described by William Tyndale in his The Obedyence of a
Christian Man (1548), a work which is itself none too laudatory of episcopacy: ‘when a
thing speadeth not well, we borrowe speach and saye, the byshope hath blessed it, because
that nothing speadeth well that they meddyl withal. If the porech be burned to or the meate
over rosted, we saye, the byshope hath put his fote in the potte or the byshope hath played
the cooke’ (Tyndale 1548, 107).
The imagery of culinary clerics develops into criticism of the ‘obscene, and
surfeted Priest [who] scruples not to paw, and mammock the sacramentall bread, as
familiarly as his Tavern Bisket’ (CPW 1:547). Milton goes on to describe the ‘canarysucking, and swan-eating palat’ of the ‘many-benefice-gaping mouth of a Prelate’ (CPW
1:548), just as William Prynne’s Lord Bishops None of the Lords Bishops (1640) described
prelates as ‘carnall men, which savour the things of the flesh, worldly minded… [and] have
a wisdome indeed, but such as is not from above, but is earthly, sensuall, and devilish’
(Prynne 1640, 6). Contemporary prelates are contrasted with their ancient counterparts,
who were ‘undiocest, unrevenu’d, unlorded’ and notable for their ‘matchles temperance,
frequent fastings, incessant prayer and preaching, continual watchings, and labours in his
Ministery’ (CPW 1:548). Milton constitutes pleasure in commercial terms, as to imagine
such a minister would be ‘a rich bootie’ (CPW 1:548).
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Of Reformation’s discussion of Constantine illuminates Milton’s understanding of
the confluence and congruence between economic and spiritual matters. He begins by
identifying what shaped Constantine’s relationship with the clergy: ‘hee appointed certain
times for Fasts, and Feasts, built stately Churches, gave large Immunities to the Clergie,
great Riches and Promotions to Bishops’ (CPW 1:556). This explains the suspiciously
invariably positive accounts of Constantine offered by the clergy: ‘they extoll Constantine
because he extol’d them; as our homebred Monks in their Histories blanch the Kings their
Benefactors, and brand those that went about to be their Correctors. If he had curb’d the
growing Pride, Avarice, and Luxury of the Clergie, then every Page of his Story should
have swel’d with his Faults’ (CPW 1:553). He urges his reader to recognise the bias of the
prelates, reminding us that ‘there is just cause therefore that when the Prelates cry out Let
the Church be reform’d according to Constantine, it should sound to a judicious eare no
otherwise, then if they should say Make us rich, make us lofty, make us lawlesse’ (CPW
1:560). We see Milton here beginning to move from the historiographical naïveté of the
History of Moscovia towards the interrogative rigour which shapes the History of Britain.
The consequence of Constantine’s enriching of the church was that the prelates
‘thought the plaine and homespun verity of Christs Gospell unfit any longer to hold their
Lordships acquaintance, unlesse the poore thred-bare Matron were put into better clothes;
her chast and modest vaile surrounded with celestiall beames they overlai’d with wanton
tresses, and in a flaring tire bespecckl’d her with all the gaudy allurements of a Whore’
(CPW 1:556). The same dynamic resurfaces in The Reason of Church-Government , where
Milton anxiously sees the ‘undeflour’d and unblemishable simplicity of the Gospell …
instead of calling her Disciples from the receit of custome, is now turn’d Publican her self;
and gives up her body to a mercenary whoredome under those fornicated arches which she
cals Gods house, and in the sight of those her altars which she hath set up to be ador’d
makes merchandize of the bodies and souls of men’ (CPW 1:849).
Soon after Constantine’s accession, ‘the Church that before by insensible degrees
welk’t and impair’d, now with large steps went downe hill decaying; at this time Antichrist
began first to put forth his horne, and that saying was common that former times had
wooden Chalices and golden Preists; but they golden Chalices and wooden Preists’ (CPW
1:557). This sharpens the voracious prelatical appetite for consumption, as they ‘gape after
possessions, they tend Lands and Livings, they coure over their gold, they buy and sell:
and if there be any that neither possesse nor traffique, that which is worse, they sit still, and
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expect guifts, and prostitute every inducement of grace, every holy thing to sale’ (CPW
1:557). We see here the origins of prelatical avarice, but Milton still suggests that passivity
is worse than activity. He favours an economic appetite which is not passively appeased
but actively satiated, as to ‘sit still, and expect guifts’ is worse than to ‘buy and sell.’
Arthur Barker notes that Milton’s ‘contrast between the degeneration of religion
which has resulted from the forces animating the bishops and its purification as designed
by the Puritans exactly parallels the Elder Brother’s contrast between the imbruting of the
spirit by lust and the spiritualising of the body by virtue’ (1942, 16):
He that has light within his own cleer brest
May sit i’th center, and enjoy bright day,
But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon. (Comus, ll.381-5)
Milton identifies such ‘Libertines’ as one of the primary ‘hinderers of Reformation’ (CPW
1:541) before cursorily dismissing them in a paragraph, claiming that ‘it will not be
requisite to Answer these men, but only to discover them, for reason they have none, but
lust, and licentiousness, and therfore answer can have none. It is not any Discipline that
they could live under, it is the corruption, and remisnes of Discipline that they seek’ (CPW
1:570).
But despite Milton’s contempt for libertines, sensuality remains fundamental to Of
Reformation. While Milton may attack libertine sensory indulgence, he uses these same
techniques to expound his rhetoric, as Ronald Cooley notes: ‘the ironic … undercurrent of
this argument, evident here as elsewhere, lies in the sensuousness of the attack on “sensuall
Idolatry,” the reliance on extremely vivid, if less than appealing, imagery in attacking the
Church’s imagery’ (1991, 25).
The physicality of Milton’s imagery in Of Reformation is evident in his
representation of the nation: ‘if we could but see the shape of our deare Mother England,
as Poets are wont to give a personal form to what they please, how would she appeare,
think ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and teares abundantly flowing
from her eyes’ (CPW 1:585). Marvell deploys a similar technique in The Last Instructions
to a Painter (1667), where a vision of England appears to Charles II as
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A sudden shape with virgin’s face
(Though ill agree her posture, hour, or place),
Naked as born, and her round arms behind
With her own tresses, interwove and twined;
Her mouth locked up, a blind before her eyes,
Yet from beneath the veil her blushes rise. (2006, 392, ll.891-6)
Charles ‘with kind hand does the coy vision press’ (l. 901), and his potentially predatory
sexual appetite is hinted at by the reminder that her ‘beauty greater seemed by her distress’
(l. 902). The implication here is that ‘kind’ may not connote benevolence, but a desire to
repeat the action in kind. A similar appetite is awakened in the bishops, who become like
Charles as they ‘began to cast a longing eye to get the body also, and bodily things into
their command, upon which their carnal desires, the Spirit dayly quenching and dying in
them, they knew no way to keep themselves up from falling to nothing, but by bolstering,
and supporting their inward rottenness by a carnal, and outward strength’ (CPW 1:576).
As a result of the abuses of the prelates, ‘the Inhabitants [of England], to avoid
insufferable grievances at home, are inforc’d by heaps to forsake their native Country’
(CPW 1:585), just as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ‘forced out of France a
significant minority of the population, including a large number of its most talented
manufacturers, craftsmen, and soldiers’ (Glozier 2006, 90). Milton’s anxiety regarding
brain drain persisted throughout his career, resurfacing in Considerations Touching the
Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings from the Church (1659), which insists that ‘they who
are taught freely at the public cost, might have their education given them on this
condition, that therewith content, they should not gadd for preferment out of their own
countrey’ (CPW 7:305). Laud’s policies ‘depopulat[ed] and weaken[ed] the nation’
(Lewalski 2003, 142), and Milton recognised that the usual remedy ‘against the
depopulation, and thinnesse of a Land within, is the borrow’d strength of firme alliance
from without’ (CPW 1:585), and the most suitable nation in this regard is ‘the prosperous,
and prudent states of the united Provinces, whom we should love’ (CPW 1:586). The
‘commodity of traffick’ was the reason for the founding of the ‘old Burgundian league
betwixt us’ (CPW 1:586), and Milton appears magnanimous about Anglo-Dutch disputes
in the Indies, as ‘though [English and Dutch] Merchants bicker in the East Indies, neither is
it safe, or warie, or indeed Christianly, that the French King, of a different Faith, should
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afford our nerest Allyes as good protection as we’ (CPW 1:586).113 Prelacy is a ‘schisme it
selfe from the most reformed and most flourishing of our neighbour Churches abroad’
(CPW 1:791), and so although ‘Religion should bind to us immortally, even such friends as
[the United Provinces], out of some principles instill’d into us by the Prelates, have bin
often dismist with distastfull answers, and sometimes unfriendly actions’ (CPW 1:586).
The reference to the ‘commodity of traffick’ marks Milton’s introduction of
explicitly economic concerns into his arguments against the prelates, a common tactic in
contemporary antiprelatical pamphlets. In A short view of the praelaticall Church of
England wherein is set forth the horrible abuses in discipline and government (1641),
Richard Bernard calculated their cost thus: ‘the whole number appertaining to
Archbishops, Bishops, Archdeacons, with the many peculiars are judged to bee no fewer
then ten thousand persons, which need yearely two hundred thousand pounds to maintaine
them all, the greater and inferiour ones, reckoning but 20 l. a man, when many have 100 l,
a yeare, some 200 l. others more’ (1641, 9).
Lionel Robbins defines economics as ‘the science which studies human behaviour
as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’ (1984,
16),114 and this concept is evident in Milton’s concern about prelatical embezzlement of
scarce resources which could be put to better use: ‘if they had one thought upon Gods
glory and the advancement of Christian Faith, they would be a meanes that with these
expences thus profusely throwne away in trash, rather Churches and Schools might be
built, where they cry out for want, and more added where too few are’ (CPW 1:590). This
anticipates the same argument made some twenty years later in Considerations, where
Milton again emphasises the financial benefits of clerical reform, arguing that the money
saved could be used to ‘to erect in greater number all over the land schooles and competent
libraries’ (CPW 7:305). Such expenses were also considered by John Taylor in his satirical
The Popes benediction, or, His generall pardon to be purchased onely with mony and
without penance (1641), a pricelist of ‘free and easie remissions to all your friends that are
well affected to our Holinesse’ (1641, 1). Of particular interest is the declaration that
113
Milton would not always be able to remain so magnanimous. As Secretary for Foreign Tongues, in 1652
he translated the Paper of Demands, discussed in Chapter 4, which exhaustively catalogued English
grievances against the Dutch.
114
This concept may be traced back through various prior theorisations of justice. See, for example, David
Hume’s Treatise of Human Understanding (1740), which offers ‘a proposition, which … may be regarded as
certain, that ‘tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of man, along with the scanty provision
nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin’ (2000, 318).
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if a man have vowed to build an Hospitall, to found a Chappell, or erect a Church
parochiall, and hath afterwards seriously considered what inconveniences may
thereby ensue, as a bad use might be made of his good intentions, and so in times to
come, vice rather then religion may be nurtured in them, and the many sums of
mony, it would cost him to no purpose; and therefore have a desire to have a
dispensation from his vow, it shall cost him ten grosses. (1641, 4)
These abuses were also lamented in Bernard’s Short View, which attacked the fact that the
Pope could impose penance ‘which the richer may commute for money, but the miserable
poore (doing their penance) cannot bee freed from their Courts without money though they
begge for it, but must stand Excommunicated, and so bee shut out of the Church and given
over to the Devill, for non-payment of money’ (1641, 14). He also attacked the monopoly
of preaching imposed by the prelates; just as merchants commonly required licence from
one of the larger trading companies in order to reach the most lucrative commodities and
markets, so too the curates ‘must pay for a Lycense to read prayers in some place; for a
Lycense to preach, for a Lycense to keepe Schoole, undoing poore beginners before they
get any thing’ (1641, 13).
Concerns about the misuse of scarce resources also resurface in The Reason of
Church-Government, where Milton argues that a man’s success is measured by ‘how and
in what manner he shall dispose and employ those summes of knowledge and illumination,
which God hath sent him into this world to trade with’ (CPW 1:801). Moreover, God does
not merely want man to hoard his gifts, but to improve them, as He ‘even to a strictnesse
requires the improvment of these his entrusted gifts’ (CPW 1:801). This is an early
instance of Milton’s engagement with the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30), but ‘in no
other work does [he] demonstrate such a thoroughly negative use of the parable, a use
bereft of the softening effects of the parable of the labourers seen in Sonnet 7 and the letter
“To a Friend”’ (Urban 2004).
In the parable of the talents, a master entrusted his three servants with a number of
talents each, to be put to good use in his absence. On his return, two of the servants had
traded with their talents and doubled their stock, to which the master says ‘Well done,
good and faithfull servant, thou hast beene faithfull over a few things, I wil make thee ruler
over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord’ (Matt. 25:23). But one of the servants
buried his talent in the ground and so made no profit, to which ‘His lord answered, and
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said unto him, Thou wicked and slouthfull servant, thou knewest that I reape where I
sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my
money to the exchangers, and then at my comming I should have received mine owne with
usurie. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents’
(Matt. 25:26-8). Poets had played on the monetary sense of ‘talent’ earlier in the
seventeenth century, as in The Lover’s Complaint (1609): ‘Lo behold these tallents of their
heir, / With twisted mettle amorously empleacht,’ (Shakespeare 1609, 38).115 Later in the
century, Robert Boyle invoked the parable of the talents to warn against the hoarding of
knowledge. In 1655, Boyle attacked ‘Physitians’ who refused to share their scientific
discoveries because they have ‘laid out much of their mony, and more of their time, in the
search of such and such a secret’ (Boyle 1655, 135). For Boyle, ‘the avarice of profitable
secrets, is so much worse than that of money, by how much the buried Treasure is more
excellent,’ and he urges his readers to ‘remember his fault that folded up his Talent in a
Napkin; and fear to feel his doom’ (Boyle 1655, 135; 138–139, quoted in Picciotto 2010,
122).
Milton alludes to the parable of the talents by likening his rhetorical and prophetic
abilities to the master’s gifts, thus defending himself against ‘an accusing voice with which
he would have to contend if he did not use his ability and his learning for public service’
(Haskin 1994, 33). By using his talents in this way, he hopes to convince the English
people to deliver themselves from the evils of prelacy, thus effecting national salvation.
But this salvation is again couched in the language of trade, as the English under prelacy
are in fact in a worse situation than the servant who buried his talents: they cannot even
keep their gifts at an equal value, but must trade them far below their value. Despite the
English people possessing ‘precious truths of such an orient lustre as no diamond can
equall’ (CPW 1:801), the prelates deceive their flocks about the true value of such divine
gifts, and so are compared to deceitful merchants: ‘fearing that this cours would soon
discover, and disgrace the fals glitter of their deceitfull wares wherewith they abuse the
people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses, practise by all means how they may
suppresse the venting of such rarities and such a cheapnes as would undoe them, and turn
their trash upon their hands’ (CPW 1:801). This evokes Revelation 18: ‘the Merchants of
the earth shall weepe and mourne over her, for no man buyeth their merchandise any more.
And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linnen, and purple and
115
While this poem has generally been attributed to Shakespeare, some scholars have recently questioned
this; see, for instance, Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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scarlet, and decked with gold, and pretious stones, and pearles: For in one houre so great
riches is come to nought’ (Rev. 18:11, 16-17). The prelates are aware of their deception,
and so ‘though they cannot but testify of Truth and the excellence of that heavenly traffick
which they bring against what opposition, or danger soever, yet needs must it sit heavily
upon their spirits’ (CPW 1:801).
The prelates thus become like monopolists who attempt to suppress the sale of a
better quality commodity, as frequently occurred in the decade preceding the antiprelatical
tracts. In 1630 Charles I granted a brass wire monopoly to James Lydsey in the hope of
rejuvenating the flagging domestic brass industry, which struggled to compete with foreign
importers. English wire workers petitioned Parliament in 1638 to disagree with the ‘late
proclamation of 19th August whereby it is first pretended that the latten wire made in
England is much better than that imported,’ complaining that ‘the whole sale of this
commodity is appropriated to the private lucre of one man’ (CSPD 1638-9: 247). The wire
workers and Milton share a common belief here: the former ‘seek not to discourage this
manufacture here, but desire that it may be for any man to make’ (CSPD 1638-9:247), as
the latter argues that ‘the functions of Church-government ought to be free and open to any
Christian man though never so laick, if his capacity, his faith, and prudent demeanour
commend him’ (CPW 1:844).
Milton believed the prelatical proliferation of liturgical ceremonies was intended to
both cement the exclusion of the laity and bring more money into the church, and ‘if any
man will contend that Ceremonies bee lawfull under the Gospell, hee may bee answer’d
otherwhere. This doubtlesse that they ought to be many and over-costly, no true Protestant
will affirme’ (CPW 1:589). Milton has no issue with the appropriate use of resources, but
he opposes the prelates’ ‘excessive wast of Treasury … [on] the Idolatrous erection of
Temples beautified exquisitely to out-vie the Papists, the costly and deare-bought
Scandals, and snares of Images, Pictures, rich Coaps, gorgeous Altar-clothes’ (CPW
1:589).
The implied illusoriness of such finery is developed by Milton’s use of alchemical
imagery. The ‘soure levin of humane Traditions mixt in one putrifi’d Masse with the
poisonous dregs of hypocrisie in the hearts of Prelates’ (CPW 1:590) recalls the account of
creation in Paradise Lost, where the
Spirit of God …
Downward purg’d
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The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob’d
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted. (PL 7.235; 237-41)
But while the ‘Infernal dregs’ are ‘infus’d [with] vital vertue … and vital warmth’ (PL
7.236) by the ‘Spirit of God,’ the prelatical ‘poisonous dregs’ ‘lye basking in the Sunny
warmth of Wealth, and Promotion’ (CPW 1:590). Creation in Paradise Lost involves
repeated acts of purifying separation, yet the prelates’ obsession with ‘what is false and
vain, / And meerly mortal dross’ (On Time, ll.5-6) leaves their matter debased and
commixed, a condition undesirable in a period where officers were employed to ‘look to
all sorts of bullions and coines, that they be not embasd and adulterated’ (Howell 1651,
17). The Reason of Church-Government recognises the
certaine attraction and magnetick force betwixt the religion and the ministeriall
forme thereof. If the religion be pure, spirituall, simple, and lowly, as the Gospel
most truly is, such must the face of the ministery be. And in like manner if the
forme of the Ministery be grounded in the worldly degrees of autority, honour,
temporall jurisdiction, we see it with our eyes it will turne the inward power and
purity of the Gospel into the outward carnality of the law; evaporating and exhaling
the internall worship into empty conformities, and gay shewes. (CPW 1:766)
In erecting Pandaemonium, the devils ‘with wondrous Art found the massie Ore, /
Severing each kinde, and scum the Bullion dross’ (PL 1.703-4), and a similar dynamic
exists in Of Reformation. The prelates’ ‘trade’ is ‘by the same Alchymy that the Pope uses,
to extract heaps of gold, and silver out of the drossie Bullion of the Peoples sinnes’ (CPW
1:592), and in doing so they create ‘the Serpents Egge that will hatch an Antichrist’ (CPW
1:590).
The devilish characteristics of the prelates are further emphasised by Milton’s
likening of them to military miners, who ‘min[e], and [sap] the out-works, and redoubts of
Monarchy’ (CPW 1:592), ‘as when Bands / Of Pioners, with Spade and Pickaxe arm’d /
Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field’ (PL 1.675-7). But however much the prelates
mimic devils, they remain inferior, as Milton reminds us
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Let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wondring tell
Of BABEL, and the works of MEMPHIAN Kings,
Learn how thir greatest Monuments of Fame,
And Strength and Art are easily outdone
By Spirits reprobate. (PL 1.692-7)
In Comus, Milton uses the attempted seduction of the Lady to develop a nuanced sexualityeconomics analogy. While masques conventionally uphold the power of chastity and
virtue, Milton’s response is more complex, as he questions the tenability of sexual
hoarding. The economic imagery which permeates the debate between the Lady and
Comus is reiterated in the final scenes, where the Lady being ‘in stony fetters fix’d, and
motionless’ (l.819) mirrors the stagnancy of an economy which follows her hoarding
example.
While Comus provided a crucial forum for Milton to consider the merits of the old
and new modes of economic thinking, the History of Moscovia eschews ‘deer Wit, and gay
Rhetorick’ (l.790) in favour of examining the practical consequences of these economic
attitudes. The bullionist thirst for accumulated gold which pervades the Moscovia
represents the extreme of the compulsion – demonstrated by both the Lady and her
Brothers – to hoard. It results not in virtue, but stagnation. The other economic extreme,
embodied by Comus’ desire to ‘consume without restraint,’ is represented no more
favourably, as manifested by the greed of the prelates and monks present throughout the
text.
These provide an early outline of the consuming clergy who are the target of
Milton’s vitriol in Of Reformation. But these clergy are not only hoarders, nor libertines,
but both. They demonstrate the tendency to both hoard and consume. The damaging effect
they exert on the church, congregation, and nation, demonstrates the deleterious nature of
the extremes of economic conduct. When taken together, the ultimate message of Comus,
the History of Moscovia, and Of Reformation, is the necessity for an economic middle
path, recognising the value of both consumption and temperance, following Aristotle’s
definition of a just person as one who would ‘distribute things to himself in relation to
another and between two others not in such a way as to give himself too much of what is
desirable and his neighbour too little, and the reverse with what is harmful, but so as to
127
give what is proportionately equal to both’ (2002, 167). If such a model was followed, ‘if
every just man that now pines with want / Had but a moderate and beseeming share … the
giver would be better thank’t’ (l.768-9; 775).
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Chapter 4
‘Nothing now stands in the way of Englishmen, but inward covetousness’:
Winstanley, Milton, and Self-Government in the 1650s
To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in
Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be
established in it. Not only the prejudices of the publick, but what is much more
unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it.
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1976, 471)
By representing sin and salvation in economic terms throughout his life, Milton was no
mere throwback to the pre-Civil War heyday of English covenant theology. Economic
soteriology continued to be propounded well into the Commonwealth by fringe religious
and political theorists such as Gerrard Winstanley. John Gurney has recently observed that
Winstanley’s Fire in the Bush (1650) is ‘both deeply religious and avowedly communist,’
and that it was ‘designed partly to remind readers of the essential theological foundations
of the Digger programme’ (2013, 70; 30), but he gives no further consideration to the
overlap between theology, economics, and politics in the tract. This chapter will begin by
examining Winstanley’s economic soteriology in Fire in the Bush, before considering how
the political and religious tracts Milton wrote during the Commonwealth and Protectorate
were animated by a concern, shared with Winstanley, that the English were unable to
govern themselves.116
Winstanley asserted the central role played by economic desires in the Fall in one
of his earliest published works, Truth Lifting up His Head above Scandals (1648). This
tract describes fallen man as one who ‘feeds, lives and delights himselfe altogether in and
upon the objects of the earth’ (WCW 1:424-5), and Gurney suggests this ‘determination to
live upon the objects of creation rather than according to the light of the spirit had poisoned
and corrupted the earth’ (2007, 93) is a recurrent idea in Winstanley’s thought. Gurney has
116
It should be noted at the outset that Winstanley and Milton were diametrically opposed on a crucial point:
the former was a fervent communist, the latter an incorrigible elitist. Nonetheless, they share common ground
in other political and theological areas, as this chapter will show.
129
noted the connections between Winstanley’s four earliest pamphlets (1648)117 and The
New Law of Righteousnes (1649), and Darren Webb (2004) has stressed the continuity
between The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652) and Winstanley’s other Digger tracts.
Winstanley’s Fire in the Bush (1650) has been largely overlooked by scholars, perhaps
because it lacks the millenarian fervour of his earliest works, the communist urgency of his
Digger tracts, and the political utopianism of the New Law of Righteousnes.
Fire in the Bush discusses ‘Adam; the Serpent, the Garden, the tree of Knowledge
of Good and evill; and the Tree of Life; and the promise of redemption’ (WCW 2:188); in
short, all the essential aspects of soteriology. Thomas Corns is right to observe that ‘the
self is at the core of Winstanley’s notion of sin’ (2006, 194), since Fire in the Bush
maintains that all of these concepts and events are located ‘within the heart of man,’ and
the idea that they are ‘without us’ is a fallacy perpetuated by ‘Judas Ministry’ (WCW
2:188) to maintain control over the populace.
For Winstanley, the Garden of Eden ‘which is the spirit of man’ is filled with both
‘weeds and hearbs’ (WCW 2:172). The herbs are ‘Joy, Peace, Love, humilitie, selfedenyall, patience, sincerity, truth, or equitie,’ but these are ‘over-spread’ by the ‘stinking
weeds … Selfe-Love, Pride, Envie, Covetousnesse after riches, honours, pleasures,
Imagination, thinking he cannot live in peace, unlesse he enjoy this or that outward object’
(WCW 2:173; 172). For Winstanley, imagination, which he defines as an undue reliance on
external things, is the fundamental error from which all other sins proceed:
Imagination is he that fills you with feares, doubts, troubles, evill surmisings and
grudges, he it is that stirs up warres and divisions; he makes you lust after every
thing you see, or heare of, and promises delight to you, in the enjoyement; as in
riches, places of Government, pleasures, societie of strange women: and when you
have all these, which you thinke or imagine to have content in, presently troubles
follow the heeles thereof; and you see your selfe naked and are ashamed. (WCW
2:177-178)
This aptly describes Adam’s attitude during the vision from Speculation, where he sees
both a ‘Beavie of fair Women, richly gay’ and men smelting ore into ‘Tooles’ and ‘what
117
The Mysterie of God, The Breaking of the Day of God, The Saints Paradise, and Truth Lifting Up Its Head
Above Scandals, all published in 1648.
130
might else be wrought / Fusil or grav’n in mettle’ (PL 11.582; 572-3). He tells Michael
‘much better seems this Vision, and more hope / Of peaceful dayes portends,’ but is
admonished ‘judg not what is best / By pleasure’ (PL 11.599-600; 603-4).
Winstanley complains that ‘every one lookes upon a God and a ruler without him,
as the Beast of the field does, few sees their Ruler within’ (WCW 2:183). The majority of
people ‘live out of themselves upon the Earth … upon riches, honors, pleasures, Ministers,
Lawyers, Armies, wife, children, Ordinances, customes, and all outward forms of
worship,’ (WCW 2:183) and this is done out of fear, since ‘they dare not live in the life of
free community, or universall Love; least others jeare, hate, and trouble them’ (WCW
2:184). But the greater anxiety is a ‘slavish feare’ that without this externalised living men
will ‘come to want food and raiment’ (WCW 2:184), and even that ‘if this power of
universall love be advanced; this will destroy all propriety, and all trading’ (WCW 2:214).
As we shall see, in the Readie and Easie Way Milton denounces his countrymen for a
similar ‘slavish feare,’ their economically motivated desire to return to monarchy.
For Winstanley, the Fall was not a historical event, nor was prelapsarian innocence
a state irretrievably lost by Adam and Eve: ‘this Innocencie, or plaine heartednesse in man,
was not an estate 6000. Yeare agoe onely; But every branch of mankinde passes through it’
(WCW 2:207). Everyone is born innocent, everyone is a prelapsarian Adam, until they are
tempted and fall into covetousness. Neatly anticipating the argument Hobbes would make
a year later in Leviathan, Winstanley notes how the ‘power in man, that causes division
and war is called by some men the state of nature, which every man brings into the world
with him’ (WCW 2:220). But Winstanley maintains that ‘this law of darknesse in the
members is not the state of Nature,’ and asks his reader to
looke upon a childe that is new borne, or till he growes up to some few yeares, he is
innocent, harmelesse, humble, patient, gentle, easie to be entreated, not envious;
And this is Adam, or mankinde in his innocency; and this continues till outward
objects intice him to pleasure, or seeke content without him; And when he
consents, or suffers the imaginary Covetousnesse within to close with the objects.
Then he falls, and is taken captive, and falls lower and lower. (WCW 2:220).
After ‘innocency,’ Winstanley identifies two further ‘estate[s] of mankinde’: ‘the time of
the curse’ and ‘the day of Christ’ (WCW 2:208; 210). ‘Innocencie’ is ‘changeable, subject
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to be overcome by temptation,’ and ‘many men live longer in their innocencie then others,
some are tempted sooner then others, but all must be tempted’ (WCW 2:208; 207).
Everyone who is tempted by covetousness will eventually fall into ‘the time of the curse,’
which makes him ‘to covet after content in objects without him, and to looke for a God
without, and so fills him with anger, envie, hypocrisie, vexation, griefe; and brings him
into bondage within himselfe’ (WCW 2:208).
But for Winstanley the Fall is not only inevitable, but necessary. He believes that
‘all must be tempted, and tried by the evill one; that so way may be made for Christ to
shew his power’ (WCW 2:207). It might be objected here that inevitable temptation does
not mean an inevitable Fall, but Winstanley goes on to argue that the Fall is indeed
necessary:
temptations and falling from innocency must be, that so man may be drawne up
into the life and strength of the righteous God, or ruler, from whom he shall never
fall again … this is the mysterie and wisdom of God, to let that innocent nature of
man fall, and be defiled by his owne invention; that so, he may declare his power,
in redeeming him from that defilement. (WCW 2:207-8)
We see here that Winstanley, unlike Milton, unambiguously subscribes to the doctrine of
the felix culpa.
Since the Fall is caused by reliance on external objects, it would be incongruous if
redemption also came from without. Winstanley asserts that ‘publick Ministers [bewitch]
you, by telling you of a Saviour at a distance,’ and that instead Christ ‘is to be seen within
... [He] must be a power within you, to deliver you from that bondage within’ (WCW
2:222; 223). The internal recognition of fallenness is the beginning of redemption:
When Mankinde begins to look within himself, and sees his pride, Envie,
Covetousnesse, Lust of the Flesh, anger, hypocrisie, and nothing but darknesse and
discontent; and begins to say with himselfe; oh what have I done, how am I falne?
… now the Seed begins to worke, to bruise the Serpents head, and man begins to
looke upward, towards the life of the Spirit within, which he sees now is a life
above the life of Earthly objects. (WCW 2:184-5)
132
We see here how ‘Christ was not expected to appear in some sudden or dramatic way “in
the clouds”, or even as an individual person to all, but to “rise up” in men and woman,
reawaken them to the rule of Reason within them, and lead them to embrace the principle
of community lost since the Fall’ (Bradstock 2011, 62).
Having outlined the internal processes of sin and salvation, Winstanley anticipates
his readers asking ‘how came mans fall in the first?’ (WCW 2:215), and he obliges with a
more concrete narrative, unique in ‘understanding … the Fall as the introduction of private
property, and not as a separate state which gave rise to it’ (Bradstock 2011, 61). In the
beginning, ‘whole mankind walked in singleness and simplicity to each other,’ and even
though some were stronger and some weaker, ‘the stronger [brother] did work for the
weaker, and the whole Earth was common to all without exception’ (WCW 2:215). But
soon the stronger brother came to believe that his greater workload entitled him to a larger
share of the Earth, and he began to ‘inclose parcells of the Earth into severall divisions, and
call those inclosures proper or peculiar to himselfe, and that the younger, or weaker brother
should lay no claime to it’ (WCW 2:216).
The stronger brother goes on to buy and sell these enclosures of land, and ‘by
reason of this bargaining, the younger, or weaker brother is more forcibly shut out of the
Earth, and so here is a foundation laid to steale the earth by craft, and to murder one
another by the sword’ (WCW 2:216). Winstanley traces all this back to the one original sin
of covetousness: ‘this enmity that brought in this division; first of inclosing; then of buying
and selling, then of killing one another for the Earth, is the curse within of imaginary
covetousnesse, and it was bred by the presentment of outward objects, tempting the five
Senses, or the living Soule’ (WCW 2:219).
Covetousness is also the root of the contemporary evils Winstanley sought to
address in his politico-economic programme, as he believed ‘there is a foure-fold power,
much Idolized, and doted upon by covetous flesh, which must be shaken to pieces’ (WCW
2:189). These were outlined as follows:
The first is the Imaginary, teaching power, called hear-say, booke-studying,
University, Divinity, which indeed, is Judas Ministry … secondly, the Imaginary
Kingly power, who by the power of the sword, and successive conquests doe set up
one part of Mankinde, to rule over another … thirdly, the imaginary Judicature,
called the Law of Justice; which indeed is but the declarative will of Conquerors,
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how they will have their Subjects be ruled … fourthly, buying and selling of the
Earth, with the fruits of the Earth’ (WCW 2:189-90)
Together, these are ‘the cause and effect of human misery and bondage’ (Webb 2004,
205). While Winstanley ‘perceives multiple forms of oppression in the Commonwealth’
(D. Loewenstein 1999, 110–111), such forms are inseparable, as although ‘all these Beasts
… differ in shape, they all agree in one oppressing power, supporting one another; one
cannot live without another … and if one truly die, all dies’ (WCW 2:191). For Winstanley,
‘the most dreadfull and terrible Beast, is the Clergy Power; for though the other three
raised them up by action; yet this Imaginary learned Beast raised them up by policie; for
self ends’ (WCW 2:194). Winstanley fulminates against the avarice of the clergy, who
‘make themselves ministers, as a man teaches birds to speak; But they doe not stay till
Christ make them, for that will be too long for them to wait, the rich Benefices will be all
taken up’ (WCW 2:200).
Milton spent over ten years, from March 1649 to the eve of the Restoration,
employed as the Secretary for Foreign Languages. But some Miltonists, driven by ‘a
misguided desire to magnify Milton’s status’ (L. Miller 1992, 7) in the Interregnum
governments, have tended to overemphasise the importance of his official post. Milton was
undoubtedly ‘close to his country’s centres of political power,’ but his job was to
communicate official policy, not to formulate it (R. T. Fallon 1993, 5).118 But while he
‘was primarily a translator, and not the formulator, of the state papers, he did have some
leeway in phraseology’ and Leo Miller has described Milton as ‘a most extraordinary
literary Secretary for Foreign Languages’ (Miller 1992, 19, 3). Milton’s source texts were
composed by ‘a regime of lawyers, merchants, and shipowners’, but he did the best he
could with this rather dry source material, supplying ‘the most appropriate level of literary
phrasing, conforming to the best classical models’ (L. Miller 1992, 17). This ability to
transform the economic to the literary is one of Milton’s great gifts, and one he put to good
use in the Defence of the English People (1651).
As Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns have noted, the Defence was an extension
of, not a digression from, Milton’s diplomatic activity: ‘Salmasius’s objective had been to
118
Leo Miller has found evidence for Milton’s attendance at only one meeting of the Council of State, the
session where Salmasius’s Royal Defence was discussed and Milton was ordered to write a rebuttal. From
‘early 1651 onward, there are strong indications that [Milton] was not present at Council policy sessions’ (L.
Miller 1992, 5).
134
render the republican regime odious across Europe; Milton writes to ease the resumption of
normal diplomatic relations with other nations in general and with the United Provinces in
particular’ (2010, 235). England and the United Provinces were bitter trading rivals, and
many of their diplomatic interactions were concerned – explicitly or implicitly – with
economic matters. We find a similar emphasis in the Defence, where much of Milton’s
invective against Salmasius and Charles centres on accusations of covetousness and greed.
Milton opens by upbraiding Salmasius for taking payment for his work, claiming
that the Frenchman’s ‘discourse was hired, … and at a high price’ which left ‘the whole
treasury … nearly drained (CPW 4:308; 309). Milton believes the Royal Defence was
written for entirely mercenary reasons, and that Salmasius was ‘unwilling to defend
Charles the father, best of kings in your judgement, before Charles the son, poorest of
kings, without some royal recompense’ (CPW 4:308). This recalls Fire in the Bush’s
depiction of Judas as a hireling who ‘was defiled and falne by temptation, that is, he was
one that followed Christ for selfe ends; not simply; like most preachers, and covetous,
bitter hearted Professors, that will covenant before hand, what they must have before they
will follow Christ’ (WCW 2:205).
Milton develops the imagery of the monetary corrupting the divine with his
comparison of Salmasius to Balaam, the mercenary seer who was asked by Balak, king of
Moab, to place a curse on the Israelites: ‘you go on to recount the very extensive annual
income of our kings … by such inducements did those betrayers of their country win you
over like that Balaam whose wickedness is known to all, encouraging you to revile God’s
people and rant against his judgements’ (CPW 4:503). But this is a peculiar biblical
parallel for Milton to draw if he is intending to emphasise Salmasius’s covetousness and
willingness to work for hire, as Balaam in fact refused Balak’s money twice because God
would not give him leave to go with Balak’s men: ‘If Balak would give me his house full
of silver and gold, I cannot goe beyond the word of the Lord my God, to doe less or more’
(Num. 22:18). Balaam only went to Balak on the third occasion because ‘God came unto
Balaam at night, and said unto him, If the men come to call thee, rise up, and goe with
them’ (Num. 22:20).119 These hardly seem the actions of a man ‘whose wickedness is
known to all’ (CPW 4:503); Balaam’s curse on the Israelites comes to pass later with the
mention of ‘women … [who] caused the children of Israel, through the counsell of Balaam,
119
It is all the stranger, then, that God reminds Balaam ‘the word which I shall say unto thee, that shalt thou
doe,’ but then His ‘anger [was] kindled, because he went,’ despite His having just given Balaam permission
to do so (Num. 22:20; 22).
135
to commit trespasse against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among
the Congregation of the Lord’ (Num. 31:16).120
Balak had a ‘house full of silver and gold’ and Milton demands to know ‘did such
boundless wealth profit an unjust and raging ruler in the end?’ (CPW 4:503). Milton’s
question evokes Marks 8:36, where Jesus asks ‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gaine
the whole world, and lose his owne soule?’ But even though the royal coffers were ‘nearly
drained’ by Salmasius, he is far from gaining the whole world, and his paltry reward does
little to satisfy his covetousness: ‘I understand that of all the money which your insatiable
greed has fixed on, you actually got but that one poor little purse with its glass beads and
the hundred pieces inside. Well, Balaam, you can take those wages of sin you wanted so
much and make the most of them!’ (CPW 4:503).
Salmasius may have made a meagre profit from the Royal Defence, but this may be
because arithmetic was apparently not one of his strengths, a fact which Milton gleefully
points out. Salmasius declares that the king has greater power than ‘more than half of the
people,’ finally asking ‘if the other half be added as well, is he not still more powerful?’
Milton sardonically replies ‘Carry on; why run off with your counting board, O great
accountant, unless you are ignorant of arithmetical progression?’ (CPW 4:470). Milton
then finds his opponent ‘turning to a new system of accounting’ when Salmasius asks
‘whether the king together with the nobles does not have more power?’ (CPW 4:470). This
Milton denies, ‘if by nobles you mean lords; for it may be that none of them deserve the
name of noble. More often far more of the commoners surpass the lords in character and
intellect’ (CPW 4:470). If these noble commoners ‘are joined by the larger or more able
part of the people,’ Milton ‘need[s] not hesitate to state that they are equivalent to the
whole people’ (CPW 4:470), and he finishes with a final savage swipe at Salmasius’s
economic incompetence: ‘add up your accounts, then, and you will find that by your
incompetent computations you have lost your capital!’ (CPW 4:470).
For all his denunciation of Salmasius’ working for hire, we must remember that
Milton was awarded £100 on 18 June 1651 by the Council of State for writing the Defence
(Campbell 1997, 119). The original order has been obliterated from the Council record
book, but another order added shortly afterwards thanks Milton for his services but does
not mention any money, ‘so it seems possible that [Milton] declined the reward, and a
120
John of Patmos also mentions ‘Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling blocke before the children of
Israel, to eate things sacrificed unto idoles, and to commit fornication’ (Rev. 2:14).
136
revised order was therefore drafted’ (Campbell 1997, 119). In the Second Defence, Milton
declared
I am content to have sought for their sake alone, and to accomplish without
recompense, those deeds which honour bade me do. Let others look to that, and do
you rest assured that I have not touched these “abundances” and “riches” of which
you accuse me, nor have I become a penny richer by reason of that renown with
which especially you charge me. (CPW 4:596)
Barbara Lewalski sees no reason to disagree with Milton here (Lewalski 2003, 255),
whereas Campbell and Corns remind us of the fact, no less true today, that ‘MPs and their
servants were not noticeably reluctant to accept whatever came their way’ (Campbell and
Corns 2010, 239). Considering that Milton was an uncompromising usurer with a shrewd
head for business, their caution may be astute.
While Milton’s official duties in 1651-2 were primarily focused on diplomatic
correspondence with Portugal, Hamburg, and Oldenburg, he also became increasingly
involved in negotiations with the Dutch before the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War
in 1652. There is no evidence that Milton was involved in the unsuccessful English envoy
to the United Provinces in early 1651 (R. T. Fallon 1993, 25), which was stalled by the
Dutch due to both ‘fears that their trading interests would be adversely affected’ (J. R.
Jones 1996, 84) and it seeming ‘shrewd policy in Amsterdam to wait for the outcome of
Charles II’s Scottish ploy’ (L. Miller 1992, 9). Following Cromwell’s emphatic victory at
Worcester on 3 September 1651, ‘legitimacy was no longer at issue, and Parliament, now
securely in power, resolved to flex its economic muscle’ (R. T. Fallon 1993, 27). Amid
millenarian clamour to secure English sovereignty of the seas ‘to prepare for the coming of
Christ’ (Wilson 1957, 40), Oliver St. John, the leader of the failed English embassy to the
Low Countries, proposed ‘out of spite’ (Farnell 1964, 422) the legislation which became
the Navigation Act of 1651.
The Navigation Act stipulated that ‘no goods or commodities whatsoever … shall
be imported or brought into this Commonwealth of England … in any other ship or ships,
vessel or vessels whatsoever, but only in such as do truly and without fraud belong only to
the people of this Commonwealth,’ or ‘to the people of that country or place, of which the
said goods are the growth, production or manufacture’ (quoted in Gardiner 1906, 468-9).
137
The Act also demanded the cessation of all foreign fishing in English territorial waters
(Gardiner 1906, 469–70). The Act was ‘primarily aimed at the Dutch’ (L. Miller 1992, 9),
who fished heavily in English waters and made the majority of their trading profits from
re-exporting foreign goods from their Amsterdam entrepôt, since their domestic products
were low-value goods such as butter, cheese, and herring. Despite being difficult to
implement, the Navigation Act nonetheless found support in the most unlikely quarters.
Winstanley’s Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652) outlined a vision of a
commonwealth where ‘if any do buy and sell the Earth or fruits thereof, unless it be to, or
with strangers of another nation, according to the Law of Navigation, they shall be both put
to death as traytors to the peace of the Common-wealth; because it brings in Kingly
bondage again: and is the occasion of all quarrels and oppressions’ (WCW 2:373).
Winstanley allowed international trading ‘for the peace of our Commonwealth … because
other Nations as yet own Monarchy, and will buy and sell,’ (WCW 2:374). But this was
only permitted on the condition that ‘our ships do transport our English goods, and
exchange for theirs, … [and] what goods our ships carry out, they shall be the
Commonwealths goods’ (WCW 2:374), echoing the Navigation Act’s attempts to minimise
foreign involvement in the importation and exportation of goods.
Winstanley was cautiously willing to allow precious metals in his commonwealth,
but primarily ‘to make dishes and other necessaries for the ornament of houses, as now
there is use made of Brass, Pewter, and Iron, or any other Metal in their use’ (WCW 2:374),
as in More’s Utopia where gold and silver are used to ‘make chamber-pots, and other
vesells that serve for most vile use’ (More 1639, 169). Nonetheless, some ready money is
to be kept ‘in case other Nations, whose commodities we want, will not exchange with us,
unless we give them money’ (WCW 2:374). In this situation ‘pieces of Silver and Gold
may be stamped with the Commonwealths Arms upon it,’ but Winstanley remains opposed
to money being ‘coyned with a Conquerors stamp upon it, to set up buying and selling
under his name’ (WCW 2:374) and Milton agrees that ‘money does not carry the ruler’s
portrait to show that it belongs to him, but to show that it is pure, and to prevent anyone
from daring to counterfeit it when it is stamped with his likeness’ (CPW 4:377).
The Navigation Act and Cromwell’s consolidation of the republic gave renewed
urgency to the Anglo-Dutch negotiations, and Miller proposes that by the end of January
1652 ‘it is quite likely that Milton was already involved’ (1992, 12) in the negotiations
which ended in the declaration of the First Anglo-Dutch War on 10 July 1652. A number
138
of English diplomatic salvos were translated by Milton, such as the Paper of Demands, an
itemised list of reparations sought by the English from the Dutch for various incidents
which came to ’16 pages of Latin text, with many names of individual persons, places and
ships, and many figures in English currency and continental currency, several times revised
and refigured’ (L. Miller 1992, 25). Milton translated various other documents as war
loomed ever closer, and Robert Fallon proposes that ‘if Milton was indeed responsible for
many of the papers that led up to the declaration [of war], it would be reasonable to
conclude that he would employed in translating the document that represents the
culmination of the negotiations’ (1993, 82–83).
While the ‘publication of the declaration [of war] in July 1652 may well have
marked the end of Milton’s close involvement in correspondence between the two nations’
(R. T. Fallon 1993, 83), economic concerns continued to shape the diplomatic
correspondence he translated throughout the 1650s. In April 1657 Milton composed a letter
of credentials for Richard Bradshaw to present to Tsar Alexis of Russia, which opens with
the sentence ‘that the English nation has had for some time now an ancient friendship with
the people of your empire, as well as great profits and very abundant trade, everyone
knows’ (CPW 5.2:788). J. Max Patrick argues that it is likely Milton also wrote the
companion piece of instructions for Bradshaw, since he had already done some reading on
the country, its people, and practices when writing the History of Moscovia (CPW
5.2:786).121 In the tracts he wrote in the twilight of the Protectorate, Milton found his
countrymen guilty of the same avarice which had so disgusted him in the Russians some
fifteen years earlier.
Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the
Church (1659) is primarily concerned with ‘the oppressions of a Simonious decimating
clergie’ (CPW 7:275). For Winstanley, the two ‘greatest sinnes in the world’ were ‘for a
man to lock up the treasuries of the Earth in Chests and houses; and suffer it to rust or
moulder, while others starve for want to whom it belongs … [and] for any man, or men,
first to take the Earth by power of the murdering sword from others’ (WCW 2:223), and in
A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) Milton concurred that the two factors ‘working much
mischief to the church of God, and the advancement of truth’ were ‘force on the one side
restraining, and hire on the other side corrupting the teachers thereof’ (CPW 7:241).
121
Considering the Moscovia drew on only two historiographical sources, we might wonder if there wasn’t
somebody better suited to the task considering Milton’s relatively scant knowledge of Russian matters.
139
But while Milton and Winstanley shared concerns about the ‘National Ministry
appear[ing] to the people to be but hirelings’ (WCW 2:298), they disagreed about the
legitimacy of hire itself. Winstanley believed there should be ‘no buying and selling in a
Free Common-wealth, neither shall any one hire his brother to work for him’ (WCW
2:359), while Milton took a more pragmatic approach, arguing in Considerations that ‘hire
of itself is neither a thing unlawful, nor a word of any evil note, signifying no more than a
due recompense or reward… that which makes it so dangerous in the church, and properly
makes the hireling, a word always of evil signification, is either the excess thereof, or the
undue manner of giving and taking it’ (CPW 7:278).
While hire possesses an inherent potential for corruption, Milton recognises it as an
economic necessity and therefore proposes ‘we must use our utmost diligence, how it may
be least dangerous’ (CPW 7:280). To this end, just as Winstanley suggested that ‘every
man shall be brought up in Trades and labours’ (WCW 2:302), Milton suggests that
clergymen learn a trade, as ‘they would not then so many of them, for want of another
trade, make a trade of their preaching’ (CPW 7:306). He laments that many ‘count it the
reproach of this age, that tradesmen preach the gospel’ (CPW 7:306), contrasting the
‘modestie, the contentedness of those forein pastors with the maintenance given them’ to
‘the avarice of ours’ (CPW 7:289). Milton’s admiration for foreign practices would not
find its fullest expression until the History of Britain, but we see it developing here.
English pastors are also inferior to their European counterparts in rhetorical skill,
reflecting Milton’s belief that erudition was linked to virtue. The English clergy, ‘through
the love of their old Papistical tithes, consider not the weak arguments, or rather
conjectures and surmises, which they bring to defend them’ (CPW 7:289). Crucially,
Milton’s opposition centres on the lack of evidence; mere ‘conjectures and surmises’ are
only idealism, and therefore insufficient justification. The proof sought by Milton is
scriptural, as he observes that ‘if Christ or his apostles had approved of tithes, they would
have either by writing or tradition recommended them to the church’ (CPW 7:290), and he
derisively notes that arguments in favour of tithes were largely based on the church fathers
(CPW 7:293), for whom Milton had little respect. He scorns the patristical ‘false
supposition,’ which is the basis for the ‘infirm and absurd’ notion that ‘he should reap from
me, who sows not to me’ (CPW 7 301).
In addition to suggesting alternative employment for the clergy, Milton proposes
that ministers be allocated to a parish for a year or two at most, rather than having lifetime
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tenure (CPW 7:305). In Oceana (1656), James Harrington analogously recommends that,
following the death of a minister, a new one should be appointed for a one-year
probationary period, after which their suitability for the post will be voted on by the elders
of the community (1992, 12). Milton emphasises the economic consequences of such a
policy, arguing that the money saved by a rotational clergy could be used ‘to erect in
greater number all over the land schooles and competent libraries’ (CPW 7:305). Milton
believes that education is currently unavailable to many due to prohibitive transportation
costs, but if more schools and libraries were built, it would overcome the need for
‘unprofitable, and inconvenient removing to another place’ (CPW 7:305), evoking the
Traveller of Gabriel Plattes’s Macaria (1641) for whom knowledge was a commodity and
who ‘travelled through many Kingdomes, and paid neither fraight nor Custome for [his]
wares, though [he] valued them above all the riches in the Kingdome’ (1641, 14).
Milton opposes a centralised source of education in favour of a wider distribution
of knowledge, just as he proposed political federalism to ‘mitigate the danger of
arbitrariness … [by] diffusing authority to the regions’ (Lewalski 2003, 371). He drew a
causal relationship between education and virtue, hoping that universal education would
soon convey ‘the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all extreme
parts, which now lie num and neglected, [and] would soon make the whole nation more
industrious, more ingenious at home, more potent, more honourable abroad’ (CPW 7:460)
For Milton, an educated populace is a virtuous populace, and as Harrington reminds
us, ‘education is the scale without which no man or nation can truly know his or her own
weight or value’ (1992, 206). Milton hopes that ‘through participation in local government
and educational institutions, citizens could be exercised and fitted for the responsibilities of
republican government’ (Lewalski 2003, 359), and the nature of such participation is made
clear when he observes that ‘in commonwealths of most fame for government, civil laws
were not established till they had been first for certain days publisht to the view of all men,
that who so pleasd might speak freely his opinion thereof, and give in his exceptions, ere
the law could pass to a full establishment’ (CPW 7:278). This is remarkably similar to
Harrington’s proposal for the legislative process in Oceana: ‘the senate having passed a
decree which they would propose unto the people, cause it to be printed and published, or
promulgated, for the space of six weeks … that which is proposed by the authority of the
senate and commanded by the people is the law of Oceana, or an act of parliament’ (1992,
237).
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But by the time he wrote the second edition of the Readie and Easie Way (1660), it
was clear that Milton’s proposals had fallen on deaf ears. The English would ‘undoubtedly’
restore the monarchy, with the result that ‘we may be forcd perhaps to fight over again all
that we have fought, and spend over again all that we have spent’ (CPW 7:423). Milton’s
fears are repeatedly couched in economic terms, as he worries that his countrymen will
squander ‘all the treasure we have spent, not that corruptible treasure only, but that far
more precious of all, our late miraculous deliverances’ (CPW 7:423), just as Winstanley
heard ‘most people cry, We have payd Taxes, given Freequarter, wasted our Estates, and
lost our Friends in the Wars, and the Taskmasters multiply over us more then formerly’
(WCW 2:279). Milton is concerned about the ‘lost labour’ of the ‘free government which
we have so dearly purchased’ (CPW 7:423). We can see, then, that in moments of crisis, he
returns to the language of economics.
Monetary imagery is also central to his criticisms of the restored court. While the
attacks on monarchy in Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates were
centred upon more abstract ideological arguments, here Milton is more concerned with the
practical consequences of the Restoration. He emphasises the luxury and debauchery of the
‘dissolute and haughty court about [the king], of vast expense and luxurie’ (CPW 7:425),
recalling Harrington’s belief that ‘the liberty of man consists[s] in the empire of his reason,
the absence whereof would betray him unto the bondage of passions’ (1992, 19)
This concern with virtuous conduct is manifest in both Milton’s fear that those
‘who fought so gloriously for liberty … can change their noble words and actions … into
the base necessity of court flatteries and prostrations’ (CPW 7:428), and in his contrasting
conceptions of class in a commonwealth and a monarchy. In the former, ‘they who are
greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges,
neglect their own affaires; yet are not elevated above thir brethren,’ while in the latter the
king is ‘ador’d like a demigod’ by ‘the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject
people’ (CPW 7:425; 426).
Milton proposes a meritocratic system which accords with Harrington’s belief that
‘where men excel in virtue, the commonwealth is stupid and unjust if accordingly they do
not excel in authority’ (1992, 35). Milton’s fear, which would be realised in the History of
Britain, is that those who have demonstrated their virtue will become base, that ‘our prime
gentry’ will be perverted by the ‘loos imploiments of court service, which will be then
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thought honourable,’ as in the French court, where ‘enticements and preferments daily
draw away and pervert the Protestant nobilitie’ (CPW 7:425; 426).
Milton opposes autocracy in the Readie and Easie Way, exclaiming ‘what madness
is it, for them who might manage nobly their own affaires themselves, sluggishly and
weakly to devolve all on a single person’ (CPW 7:427).122 Nevertheless, he maintains that
the ‘Grand or General Council’ must be ‘perpetual’ in order to respond to events
immediately and effectively, as ‘the opportunity of affairs [may be] gain’d or lost in a
moment’ (CPW 7:433). Winstanley argued that ‘to remove Officers of State every year
will make them truly faithful, knowing that others are coming after who will look into their
ways; and if they do not do things justly, they must be ashamed when the next Officers
succeed’ (WCW 2:318), and Milton grudgingly concedes the possibility of replacing the
oldest third of the senators each year. But this concession is undermined by his sour
admonition that ‘it appears not how this can be done, without danger and mischance of
putting out a great number of the best and ablest: in whose stead new elections may bring
in as many raw, inexperienced and otherwise affected, to the weakening and much altering
for the worse of public transactions’ (CPW 7:435).
Both Winstanley and Milton saw themselves as proposing an interim government,
with the former responding to the accusation that he would ‘have no government’ by
declaring ‘True Government is that I long for to see, I waite till the power, Authority, and
government of the King of righteousnesse rule over all, for as yet the power and dominion
of the Prince of darknesse rules every where, and that is the government, which must be
throwne down’ (WCW 2:198). The fixed senate delineated in the Readie and Easie Way is
likewise ‘much better doubtless … in this wavering condition of our affairs, … till the
commonwealth be thoroughly settled in peace and safetie’ (CPW 7:441). The benefits of
such fixity are represented in economic terms, as Milton is confident that if senators are
only replaced due to death or default, ‘there can be no cause alleged why peace, justice,
plentifull trade and all prosperitie should not thereupon ensue throughout the whole land’
(CPW 7:444).
The use of economic language becomes even more emphatic in the peroration of
the Ready and Easy Way. While one might expect Milton to conclude the tract with a
122
This starkly contrasts his declaration five years earlier in the Second Defence: ‘Cromwell, we are
deserted! You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend. In
unison we acknowledge your unexcelled virtue’ (CPW 4:671).
143
rhetorical flourish extolling the virtues of the Good Old Cause, he recognises that he would
do so in vain:
What I have spoken, is the language of that which is not call’d amiss the good Old
Cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, then
convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were
sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with
the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse
inhabitants are deaf to. (CPW 7:462)
However much Milton still believed in the Good Old Cause, at this stage he recognises the
futility of an appeal to idealism. He argues that popular support for the Restoration is
rooted in the belief that ‘nothing but kingship can restore trade,’ to which he answers that
‘trade flourishes nowhere more then in the free commonwealths of Italie, Germanie, and
the Low Countries’ (CPW 7:461). He attacks the immoderate economic appetite of the
English by claiming that the ‘luxurious expenses of a nation upon trifles or superfluities’
serve only to satisfy ‘the profuse living of tradesmen’ (CPW 7:461). The nation’s
profligacy is attributed to the fear that, if the people ‘should betake themselves to
frugalitie, it might prove a dangerous matter, least tradesmen should mutinie for want of
trading,’ and that therefore ‘we must forgo and set to sale religion, libertie, honour, safetie,
all concernments, to keep up trading,’ but monarchy is a ‘new guilded yoke’ which ‘neither
shall we obtain or buy at an easie rate’ (CPW 7:461; 450).
Milton thus applies the tenets of free trade to the market itself: if so much must be
sacrificed to maintain trade at the reckless levels desired by the English people, then rather
than artificially maintaining this volume of trade by eschewing virtuous actions and
government, a laissez-faire approach must be inaugurated. By addressing the root causes of
corruption by treating education (the means of production of civic virtue) as something
owned and participated in by all, Milton hopes the nation can overcome its predilection for
debauchery and monarchy. This will eventually establish a natural equilibrium, restoring
the commonwealth which he was adamant offered ‘the only possibility of long-term
stability’ (Davis 1981a, 692) and was even ‘planely commended, or rather enjoind, by our
saviour himself’ (CPW 7:424).
144
In 1650, Winstanley saw his countrymen living in a way which was far from that
‘enjoind by our saviour himself.’ For Winstanley, the Fall was not in the distant past, but
something that happened every day when people submitted to pleasure and sought
fulfilment in external objects. He represented this submission to externality in concretely
economic terms, and in Fire in the Bush private property, hire, and avarice are causes, not
symptoms, of this economic Fall.
Milton’s writings in the 1650s exhibit a similar concern with the consequences of
covetousness in the religious and political spheres. In the First Defence he attacks
Salmasius’ working for hire, before turning his attention to hirelings themselves in
Considerations. The Readie and Easie Way sketches an ideal commonwealth, but even as
he was writing Milton knew it would never materialise. The avaricious atavism of the
English would lead back to monarchy, and both Milton and Winstanley agree that while
‘nothing now stands in the way of Englishmen, but inward covetousness’ (WCW 2:174),
this was an urge that could not be overcome.
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Chapter 5
‘Account mee man’: The Price of Redemption in the Christian Doctrine and Paradise
Lost
If no other way to Neroes raigne
The fates could finde, if gods their Crownes obtaine,
At such deare rates, and Heaven could not obey
Her Jove, but after the sterne Giants fray;
Now we complaine not, gods, mischiefe and warre
Pleasing to us; since so rewarded, are.
– Lucan, Pharsalia (Trans. Thomas May 1631, sig. A2r)
Blair Hoxby describes Paradise Lost as a text in which ‘Satan is associated with grandiose
mercantile ventures and imperial projects and Adam’s vision from the Top of Speculation
includes a disturbing panorama of global exploitation’ (2002, 12), and I concur that much
of the poem’s economic imagery is deployed negatively. But if Hoxby is right, and Milton
had indeed by this point come to view the mechanics of long-distance trade – that is, the
transformation of immediate loss into eventual profit – as symptomatic of corruption, it
would be peculiar if he were to represent the atonement as the repayment of a debt by
proxy and to structure the vision from Speculation around Adam’s gradual realisation that
what he lost in the Fall would be recouped with profit. But this is precisely what Milton
does in Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic poem is no anomaly in this regard, as we find the
same conceptualisation of the atonement in the Christian Doctrine.
This chapter will begin by examining Milton’s use of economic imagery to outline
key concepts in the Christian Doctrine. While the structural influence of William Ames on
Milton’s theological treatise has been noted (Lares 2001, 91), I will show that the
economic soteriology outlined in the Christian Doctrine in fact has more in common with
radical covenant theologians such as Thomas Hooker than with Ames’s staid Calvinism.
Having established the importance of economic concepts to Milton’s theology in this
period, I will then go on to discuss the economic ideas which run through Paradise Lost.
The negative side of such associations – such as imperialism in the New World and Satan
being characterised as a spice trader – have been amply discussed by Hoxby and his
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predecessors, so I need not retread their ground. To create a more nuanced reading, I will
instead consider how Milton represents economic ideas both positively and negatively in
his great epic. The latter will be treated in my analysis of the devils’ mining and metallurgy
in Book 1, where Milton’s debt to Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia (1540) has previously
gone unnoticed by scholars. But for all the satanic associations of gold and trade, the
language of economics is not exclusively negative in Paradise Lost. Milton repeatedly
conceptualises sin and salvation in terms of debt, repayment, and profit, and economic
ideas are in fact fundamental to the soteriological message of the poem.
Before I continue, it is worth emphasising that I do not intend to extend Maurice
Kelley’s project in This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana as a
Gloss upon Paradise Lost (1941). Michael Lieb is rightly suspicious of Kelley’s reading
‘because of its determination to make correspondences between poem and treatise a oneto-one operation. This approach assumes that what the poem fails to yield about complex
doctrinal matters will be set straight by the theological treatise’ (Lieb 2007, 416). The
relationship between the treatise and the poem are of little concern to my thesis; rather,
these two texts are of interest because they both contain a wealth of examples of Milton’s
economic understanding of sin and salvation in the late 1650s and early 1660s.123
As we saw in Chapter 2, Herbert used economic imagery to render divine mysteries
intelligible to postlapsarian man, and so too the Christian Doctrine’s reliance on metaphors
of debt and repayment manifests Milton’s belief that ‘God is always described or outlined
not as he really is but in such a way that will make him conceivable to us’ (CPW 6:133).
But before examining the economic soteriology of the tract, it is worthwhile outlining
Milton’s views on free will which were so crucial to his ideas of sin and salvation.
The influence of William Ames on the Christian Doctrine has already been noted
in Chapter 1, and just as Ames maintained that ‘it is so far off, that the will of God … doth
urge all things with hard necessity’ (1642, 34), Milton likewise claims that ‘God made no
absolute decrees about anything which he left in the power of men, for men have freedom
of action’ (CPW 6:155). This is more than mere ontological musing; asserting man’s free
will exculpates God, who has ‘not decreed that everything must happen inevitably.
Otherwise we should make Him responsible for all the sins ever committed, and should
make demons and wicked men blameless’ (CPW 6:164-5).
123
The Christian Doctrine was brought to its present (albeit unfinished) state by 1660 (Campbell et al.
2007b, 68), and according to Edward Phillips, Paradise Lost was written between 1658 and 1663 (Darbishire
1931, 13).
147
But while free will was central to the Fall, it is even more crucial to redemption,
and it is here that we begin to see economic imagery creeping in. In the Christian Doctrine,
as in Paradise Lost, it is clear that
in the love and worship of God, and thus in their own salvation, men should always
use their free will. If we do not, whatever worship or love we men offer to God is
worthless and of no account. The will which is threatened or overshadowed by any
external decree cannot be free, and once force is imposed all esteem for services
rendered grows faint and vanishes altogether. (CPW 6:189)
For Milton, worship is a ‘service rendered,’ and his belief that mandatory praise is
‘worthless and of no account’ reminds us of Hooker’s God, who ‘cals for … Good money:
will he be payd with counters and shews? No, but currant money of England’ (1644, 25).
Freely willed belief is the condition ‘without which the sprinkling of Christ’s blood would
have been of no profit’ to ‘believers’ (CPW 6:183).
Christ’s redemptive blood can bring profit to believers, and the Fall itself can also
be seen in terms of profit and loss. The Christian Doctrine maintains that Adam and Eve
‘did not expect for a moment that they would lose anything good by eating the fruit, or that
they would be worse off in any way at all’ (CPW 6:390), and we will see in Paradise Lost
that they in fact expected to gain a great deal. But eating the fruit actually came at a
heinous cost to themselves and their descendants: ‘both of them committed theft, robbery
with violence, murder against their children (i.e., the whole human race); each was
sacrilegious and deceitful, cunningly aspiring to divinity although thoroughly unworthy of
it, proud and arrogant’ (CPW 6:384-5).
Adam and Eve used their free will not to praise God, but to disobey him. To save
fallen man from death and God’s wrath, Christ uses his own free will correctly by
‘submitt[ing] himself voluntarily, both in life and in death, to the divine justice, in order to
suffer all the things which were necessary for our redemption’ (CPW 6:438). As in
Preston’s New Covenant, where Jesus ‘hath undertaken on our part, to give satisfaction by
his death, and likewise to make us obedient to his Father’ (Preston 1629, 84), Milton’s
Christ is a ‘mediator’ who ‘offered himself to God the father as a sacrifice for sinners, and
has always made, and still continues to make intercessions for us’ (CPW 6:418; 433).
The description of Christ’s mediation between God and man then moves from the
legalistic to the monetary, with Milton defining the ‘satisfaction’ as when Jesus ‘fully
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satisfied divine justice by fulfilling the law and paying the just price on behalf of all men’
(CPW 6:443). As so often in Milton’s thought, this transaction is not just a payment, but
specifically the repayment of a debt at risk of defaulting. Milton glosses ‘the just price on
behalf of’ with reference to a range of biblical texts which describe Christ paying for man
with His blood. The citation of 1 Timothy 2:5-6 (‘Christ Jesus, who gave himselfe a
ransome for all’) includes a quotation from the Greek, whereon Milton observes ‘the Greek
words plainly signify the substitution of one person for another’ (CPW 6:444). This aptly
describes the system of standing surety on a loan, as in the Merchant of Venice, where
Antonio first offers his body and then his soul for Bassanio:
I once did lend my body for thy wealth,
Which, but for him that had your husband’s ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly. (5.1.263; Bailey 2013, 73)
Such oaths and binding remind us of Hooker’s declaration that ‘it is a sweet thing that the
Lord hath bound himself by Oath to us’ (1644, 22), and the usurious allusions are
compounded by Milton’s citation of Hebrews 7:22, which describes Jesus as ‘a suretie of a
better Testament.’ Milton’s interest in texts which represent salvation as payment of a debt
is not merely due to the fact that usury was Milton’s ‘own lifelong means of making a
living, a source of income more lasting than the salaries he drew as a teacher and then state
servant’ (von Maltzahn 2008, 72). Relationships of payment were in fact fundamental to
Milton’s biblical hermeneutics, as he says in the Christian Doctrine ‘the restoration of man
is a matter of desert. It is in this sense that those texts are to be understood which indicate a
system of recompense and remuneration’ (CPW 6:451).
But this recompense cannot come from man’s spiritual coffers, depleted as they are
by sin. Although ‘our justification is freely given so far as we are concerned, … it is not
free from Christ’s point of view’ (CPW 6:486). Christ ‘paid the price, and imputed our sins
to himself’ (CPW 6:486), and Milton emphasises that fallen man could not hope for a
better deal since ‘we receive [Christ’s] righteousness, imputed to us, as a gift. We pay
nothing for it, we merely have to believe. Thus the Father is appeased, and pronounces all
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believers righteous. There could not be a simpler or more equitable method of satisfaction’
(CPW 6:486).
While Milton’s economic understanding of soteriology is roughly delineated in the
Christian Doctrine, the costs and profits of the Incarnation are more fully fleshed out in
Paradise Lost. Milton gilded his great epic with a wealth of economic imagery, and his
debt to Guillame Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks (1584) has long been recognised by critics.124
Du Bartas opens the poem with the invocation of his divine muse: ‘Lift up my soul, my
drossy spirits refine / With learned art enrich this work of mine.’125
The reference to ‘drossy spirits’ prefigures Du Bartas’ and Milton’s emphasis on
the correspondence between metallurgical and spiritual processes of refinement,
highlighting the homonymic significance of ‘work of mine.’ Paradise Lost indeed appears
to be a ‘work of mine’ in the frequent characterisation of God as a blacksmith. Belial
likens God’s breath to bellows, advising against war on Heaven by asking ‘What if the
breath that kindl’d those grim fires / Awak’d should blow them into sevenfold rage / And
plunge us in the flames?’ (PL 2.170-172). If the devils instead submit to the ‘Omnipotent
Decree’ (PL 2.198) and remain in Hell, Belial maintains it is possible that
Our Supream Foe in time may much remit
His anger, and perhaps …
These raging fires
Will slack’n, if his breath stir not thir flames. (PL 2.210-11; 213-14)
It is not only the devils who describe God’s activity in metallurgical terms. For the
narrator, the ‘Empyreal Aire’ is God’s ‘tempring’ (PL 7.14; 15), while in Raphael’s
account of creation, God ‘Then founded, then conglob’d / Like things to like, the rest to
several place / Disparted’ (PL 7.239-241). ‘Founded’ invokes the image of God working in
a foundry, a reading supported by the earth being a ‘conglobed’ drop of metal. Milton’s
God becomes, like Du Bartas’s, simultaneously ‘smith, founder, purifier’ (DW 2D1W,
968).
124
See Charles Dunster, Considerations on Milton’s Early Reading and the Prima Stamina of his Paradise
Lost (London: John Nicols, 1800) and George Coffin Taylor, Milton’s Use of Du Bartas (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1934).
125
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester and ed. Susan
Snyder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 1D1W, 5-6, hereafter cited parenthetically as DW by day, week,
and line number.
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But while God is the master smith of creation, Milton lavishes most technical detail
on the mining of the devils in Book 1. Close parallels to two sixteenth-century treatises on
mining and metallurgy, Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia (1540) and Georgius
Agricola’s De Re Metallica (1556), suggest that these texts furnished Milton with technical
knowledge of the process of mining and smelting. The connections between the
descriptions of the devils’ mining and Agricola’s treatise have been acknowledged by
Alastair Fowler (J. Milton 2007, 103 n.704), and Diane McColley has observed that
‘Milton shows some knowledge of mining handbooks’ like Gabriel Plattes’s A Discovery
of Subterranean Treasure (1639) (McColley 2007, 48). Milton’s use of Biringuccio has so
far been overlooked.126
By using mining treatises as part of his larger theodical project, Milton follows
Francis Bacon’s recognition of the overlap between metallurgical and intellectual
endeavours: ‘we should divide [natural philosophy] into the mine and the furnace: and ...
make two professions or occupations of natural philosophers, some to be pioneers and
some smiths, some to dig, and some to refine and hammer’ (Bacon 1965, 90). While Juliet
Cummins reads the early sections of Paradise Lost as ‘Milton’s condemnation of mining’
(2007, 169), Milton is in fact the smith to Agricola and Biringuccio’s pioneers, refining
and hammering their ideas into new, more positive forms.
Paradise Lost’s status as a ‘work of mine’ is hinted at by the opening reference to
the abundance of sulphur in Hell (PL 1.68-9), which is an element described in De la
pirotechnia as ‘the prime agent of nature in the composition of metals’ (Biringuccio 1990,
86). This ubiquity of sulphur leads Milton to advise his reader not to ‘admire / that riches
grow in Hell; that soyle may best / Deserve the precious bane’ (PL 1.690-2), and John
Gillies finds the descriptions of the mining and construction in Hell ‘plausible’ because
‘the geology of [H]ell is effectively identical with that of [H]eaven and earth’ (Gillies
2007, 48). The inhospitality of the ‘Plain, forlorn and wilde’ (PL 1.180) is the reason that it
is conducive to mining, as the terrain most likely to yield gold is ‘the most rugged
mountains that are completely barren of soil, trees, and grasses’ (Biringuccio 1990, 29).
The devils soon encounter a
126
Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–c. 1539) was an Italian metallurgist and armament maker whose
Pirotechnia (1540) ‘is the earliest printed work to cover the whole field of metallurgy’ (Gnudi 1990, x). In
De re metallica, Agricola spoke highly of the Pirotechnia and described its author as ‘a wise man
experienced in many matters’ (Agricola 1912, xxvi, quoted in Gnudi 1990, xvii). Biringuccio’s influence
persisted through Milton’s time, as in 1675 Robert Hooke consulted the Pirotechnia ‘for practical
information’ (Gnudi 1990, xvii).
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Hill not far, whose griesly top
Belch’d fire and rowling smoke; the rest entire
Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore. (PL 1.670-3)
Analogously, Biringuccio describes mineable mountains being covered ‘in place of leaves
and blossoms … [by] fumosities, marcasites with small veins of heavy mineral … from
these things, when they are found, it is possible to make certain inference that such a
mountain contains ores, and as the signs are more or less, so are the minerals plentiful and
rich or poor’ (1990, 13).
The fact that the ‘entire’ mountain shines with the ‘’glossie scurff’ of marcasite
indicates the immense quantity of ore within. The devils’ mining party is led by Mammon,
the Faerie Queene’s ‘uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight’ (II.vii.3). Spenser’s description
of Mammon’s ‘ill favour’d sight’ (II.vii.3) is expanded in Paradise Lost to create ‘one of
those several figures in Milton who look and cannot see’ (Forsyth 2008, 187). Mammon’s
fall is no surprise, since this ‘mining engineer’ has already ‘worked in heaven’ (Gillies
2007, 48):
Ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,
Then aught divine. (PL 1.680-3)
Mammon’s avarice is backed up by technical knowledge, as the devils follow De re
metallica’s advice to ‘hire as many men as one needs, and send them to various works’
(Agricola 1912, 25). In a grim foreshadowing of the division of labour which leads to the
fall (PL 9.214), the ‘numerous Brigad’ (PL 1.675) of devils divide into three groups to
carry out the mining and smelting process more efficiently. The first group divert ‘veins of
liquid fire / Sluc’d from the Lake’ to facilitate the ‘second multitude[’s]’ founding of the
‘massie Ore’ (PL 1.701-3). Biringuccio’s recommended method of smelting ore is to skim
off the slag ‘layer by layer … until the clear metal is reached … then open the hole of the
forehearth and let it run into the ditch that is customarily made near by’ (1990, 154).
Accordingly, the second group of devils ‘scum’d the Bullion dross’ (PL 1.704) while the
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third group of devils ‘had form’d within the ground / A various mould, and from the
boyling cells / By strange conveyance fill’d each hollow nook’ (PL 1.705-7).
Mammon reminds his audience that Hell ‘wants not her hidden lustre, Gemms and
Gold’ (PL 2.271), and the diabolical associations of gold set up here indeed appear to
support Hoxby’s assertion that economic matters serve a primarily negative function in
Paradise Lost. But this reading seems less assured when we consider that Milton
persistently represents not only sin, but also salvation, in terms of debt, repayment, and
profit. Unlike Flaminius in Timon of Athens, who hopes that ‘molten coin’ will be
Lucullus’ ‘damnation’ (3.1.48), Milton recognises that while gold should not be sought as
an end in itself, it can still serve a worthy purpose in his theodicy, as it ‘guilds the virtuous,
and lends them wings / to raise their thoughts unto rarest things’ (DW 3D1W, 911-12).
In this, Milton follows both Agricola and Biringuccio, whose treatises addressed
the ethical issues surrounding mining. In considering the idea that gold and silver are
‘scourges’ because they bring jealousy and ruin for those who own them, Agricola
wonders ‘might not anything that we possess be called a scourge?’ (1912, 16). Hamlet
maintained that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (2.2.244-5),
and the Tree of Knowledge’s ethical neutrality is the very reason it was used by God, since
‘it was necessary that one thing at least should be either forbidden or commanded, and
above all something which was in itself neither good nor evil, so that man’s obedience
might in this way be made evident’ (CPW 6:351-2). Biringuccio suggests that ‘of all the
things created by the most high God … not one … has been produced without some
particular gift,’ and he urged his reader ‘never to lack the desire to understand everything
that may be useful … you must always give eye and ear to it and must despise nothing nor
have fear of any of those things which may harm’ (1990, 33). Milton adopts this attitude
when he decides to use metaphors of commerce throughout the poem. While the devils’
metallurgy gives mining and gold its customary negative associations, we also find some
of the most important and beneficial events of the poem – such as the creation and
atonement – to be reliant on the imagery of monetary transactions.
Man’s relation to God is frequently expressed in economic terms, and this is
evident from his very creation, when, Raphael tells Adam, ‘God on thee / Abundantly his
gifts hath also pour’d / Inward and outward both’ (PL 8.219-221). The hierarchy of
allegiance between animal, man, and God is constituted in terms of payment: the animals
‘pay [Adam] fealtie / With low subjection’ (PL 8.344-45), just as God asks, without free
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will ‘what praise could [man] receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid’ (PL
3.106-7). It might be objected that this is mere homonymy, and Milton means nothing
financial by these payments of fealty. But we must remember that during the medieval
period, fealty was often literally paid, as ‘in post-Conquest England, … money payments
were permitted in lieu of military service’ (Goodman 1995, 170). Before writing Paradise
Lost Milton had familiarised himself with English history in preparation for writing the
History of Britain, so he was aware of the financial dimensions of fealty and used it with
this sense in mind in his epic poem. Moreover, the idea of payment in lieu of service aptly
describes the trajectory of Adam’s relationship to God, as he is ultimately unable to serve
him obediently and therefore must find another way to pay.
While God disapproves of forced obedience, Adam and Eve delight in tendering
due praise, as they start each day ‘lowly … bow’d adoring, and began / Thir Orisons, each
Morning duly paid’ (PL 5.144-5). For them, the terms of their contract with God are
equitable: in exchange for God’s pouring his abundant gifts on them, He requires
From [them] no other service then to keep
This one, this easie charge …
Not to taste that onely Tree
Of knowledge. (PL 4.420-21; 423-4)
For the fallen devils, such praise is far from an ‘easie charge.’ While ‘in Heav’n’ it would
have been their ‘delight’ to shower their ‘envied Sovran’ with ‘servile offerings,’ now
‘Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom [they] hate’ would be ‘wearisom’ (PL 2.244249). Rather than repaying God, they prefer independence, and this independence is
articulated in economic terms as they wish to live ‘free, and to none accountable’ (PL
2.255). For Mammon, this is feasible due to Hell’s mineral wealth. Hell is quite capable of
mimicking Heaven’s light, since
this Desart soile
Wants not her hidden lustre, Gemms and Gold;
Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise
Magnificence; and what can Heav’n shew more? (PL 2.270-3)
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In Heaven, Satan saw rebellion as a way to raise himself to magnificence, a means for this
‘desperate debtor’ (Greteman 2013, 151) to escape what he owed God:
I sdeind subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome, still paying, still to ow; (PL 4.50-53)
If true, this is certainly ‘an awesome obligation so impossible to fulfil that failure is
inevitable’ (Schwartz 1993, 68). But Satan swiftly admits that he has misrepresented the
debt,
Forgetful what from [God] I still receivd,
And understood not that a grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and dischargd; what burden then? (PL 4.54-57)
Commenting on this passage, Hawkes has rightly observed that Satan ‘imagined his
relationship to the deity in quantitative terms … and this led him to imagine gratitude as a
compound interest, a never-ending, always increasing burden exacted on a regular
temporal basis’ (2011, 517). This much is true, but Hawkes is wrong to say that ‘Satan
refuses to pay his debt because he fails to understand it. He thinks usury is unfair because
he misconceives it’ (2011, 517). Satan had previously misconceived divine usury, but
Hawkes’s use of the present tense suggests that Satan still misunderstands the arrangement.
Lines 54-57 above demonstrate that Satan in fact has a new understanding, and this is
corroborated by earlier lines which Hawkes omits from his quotation:
Me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less then to afford him praise,
The easiest recompence, and pay him thanks,
How due! (PL 4.43-48)
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Instead of paying God his ‘due,’ Satan ‘Warr[ed] in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless
King,’ and he ruefully exclaims ‘Ah wherefore! He deservd no such return / From me’ (PL
4.41-43). These are not the words of one who persists in ‘think[ing] usury unfair’ (Hawkes
2011, 517), for if Satan still thought the arrangement unfair he would hardly call praise
‘the easiest recompence’ and consider thanks ‘due.’
Satan is acutely aware of how he reneged on his due payment of thanks to God, and
so the only means of repentance is ‘submission; and that word / Disdain forbids [him], and
[his] dread of shame / Among the spirits beneath’ (PL 4.81-83). Nevertheless, he persists
in understanding both sin and redemption in monetary terms, as he fears that if he
‘repented and then ‘soon unsa[id] / What feign’d submission swore,’ the resulting ‘worse
relapse / And heavier fall’ would ‘purchase deare / Short intermission bought with double
smart’ (PL 4.95-6; 100-102). Instead, since Satan believes man to have been made to
‘spite’ the fallen angels, he concludes ‘spite then with spite is best repaid’ (PL 9.177-178).
The misunderstanding of divine usury which leads to Satan’s fall is replicated in his
seduction of Eve, where he insists that God is nothing more than a swindler:
The Gods are first, and that advantage use
On our belief, that all from them proceeds;
I question it, for this fair Earth I see,
Warm’d by the Sun, producing every kind,
Them nothing. (PL 9.718-22)
By this stage, Satan is well aware of the actual nature of the usurious relationship between
man and God, but he wilfully misrepresents it to Eve by depicting God as an unscrupulous
usurer who exacts the payment of praise on false grounds.
Having implied that Eve is getting ‘nothing’ in return for her payments of praise to
a barren God, Satan then proceeds to offer an alternative arrangement. He begins by telling
Eve that he has lost nothing by eating the fruit:
Doe not believe
Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die:
How should ye? by the Fruit? It gives you Life
To Knowledge. By the Threatner? Look on mee,
Mee who have touch’d and tasted, yet … live. (PL 9.684-688)
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But merely insisting that Eve ‘shall not Die,’ will hardly be enough to tempt her; Satan
must also convince her that there is much to be gained from eating the fruit. Accordingly,
he enumerates the profits ripe for the taking: ‘your Eyes … shall perfetly be then / Op’nd
and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods’ (PL 9.706-708). The serpent’s promises of profit seem
more credible since they are of a specific and proportionate amount, with consumption of
the fruit offering a determinate movement up the great chain of being: ‘that ye should be as
Gods, since I as Man, / Internal Man, is but proportion meet, / I of brute human, yee of
human Gods’ (PL 9.710-712).
This emphasis on ‘proportion meet’ normalises the consumption of the fruit for
Eve, as Eden is a place where she and Adam ‘took only what they needed and knew no
greed or want’ (Stoll 2008, 243). She had earlier described to the serpent how the
‘aboundance’ of fruit-bearing trees in Eden
leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht,
Still hanging incorruptible, till men
Grow up to thir provision, and more hands
Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. (PL 9.621-624)
As well as recalling Comus’ warning that ‘a pet of temperance’ would leave the earth
‘surcharg’d of her own weight, / and strangl’d with her waste fertility’ (ll.728-729), this
also anticipates Adam Smith’s objection to the stockpiling of bullion since it would be like
attempting to
increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an
unnecessary number of kitchen utensils … [because] it would be absurd to have
more pots and pans than were necessary for cooking the victuals usually consumed
… [and] if the quantity of victuals were to increase, the number of pots and pans
would readily increase along with it, a part of the increased quantity of victuals
being employed in purchasing them, or in maintaining an additional number of
workmen whose business it was to make them. (1976, 439–440)
After Eve’s fall, Adam’s musings on the fruit turn first to proportion, as the serpent ‘gaines
to live as Man / Higher degree of Life,’ which is an ‘inducement strong / To us, as likely
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tasting to attaine / Proportional ascent, which cannot be / But to be Gods, or Angels Demigods’ (PL 9.933-937 ). The symmetry between Satan’s seduction of Eve and her seduction
of Adam is reinforced when she speaks like the serpent:
I
Have also tasted, and have also found
Th’ effects to correspond, opener mine Eyes,
Dimm erst, dilated Spirits, ampler Heart,
And growing up to Godhead …
On my experience, Adam, freely taste. (PL 9.873-877; 988)
At the moment of Adam’s fall, Milton suggests that Adam and Eve will receive an
unexpected return on their investment with a dry aside that ‘in recompence (for such
compliance bad / Such recompence best merits) from the bough / She gave him of that fair
enticing Fruit’ (PL 9.994-996). Satan perverts Eve’s fealty from God to nature and thus
leads her to ‘worship a vegetable’ (Lewis 1960, 126), and Adam’s loyalty deviates in turn
to Eve, to whom he declares ‘I the praise / Yeild thee, so well this day thou hast purvey’d’
(PL 9.1020-1021). Both have been cheated by the serpent, but Adam is particularly
angered by the return of his investment in Eve:
O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give eare
To that false Worm, of whomsoever taught
To counterfeit Mans voice, true in our Fall,
False in our promis’d Rising; since our Eyes
Op’nd we find indeed, and find we know
Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got …
Is this the Love, is this the recompence,
Of mine to thee, ingrateful Eve[?] (PL 9.1067-1072; 1163-4)
Promised profit turns to loss, and, were it not for Jesus’ intercession, would remain that
way. The Son asks God
should Man finally be lost, should Man
Thy creature late so lov’d, thy youngest Son
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd
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With his own folly? That be from thee farr. (PL 3.150-153)
But while Satan ‘question[ed]’ the justice of divine usury, God is adamant that sin
demands a ‘rigid satisfaction’ for man:
He with his whole posteritie must dye,
Dye hee or justice must; unless for him
Som other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death. (PL 3.209-212)
Jonathan Sheehan argues that God here ‘clearly wants to exit from the dilemma his own
justice caused: he wants some way to relax the strictures of the law’ (2011, 73), but this
idea of a God who decrees himself into an impotent corner is problematic. Elliott
Visconsi’s reading is more convincing, as he sees God as ‘not overly rigorous.’ Rather,
‘absolute … justice cannot exist if crimes go unpunished. Since justice flows from the fact
of a voluntarist universe, the death sentence is cast as the necessary or inevitable
consequence of creaturely liberty rather than as excessive divine rigour’ (2008, 102).
In his fallen state, man on his own can only repay sin with his death: ‘once dead in
sins and lost; / Atonement for himself or offering meet, / Indebted and undon, hath none to
bring’ (PL 3.233-235). Yet as Paul reminds Timothy, there is ‘one Mediatour betweene
God and men, the man Christ Jesus, Who gave himself a ransome for all’ (1 Tim. 2:5), and
so the Son declares ‘Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life / I offer, on mee let thine
anger fall; / Account mee man’ (PL 3.236-238).
Leah Whittington describes the Son here as ‘emerg[ing] out of the silence to take
on the burden of raising the collective fortune’ (2010, 588), which is an apt choice of
words; in asking to be ‘account[ed] man’ the Son stands surety for man’s debt in order to
avoid the latter’s spiritual bankruptcy. This idea of legal intercession is developed later
when, on hearing Adam and Eve’s repentant prayers in Book 11, the Son declares he will
become their
Advocate
And propitiation, all [their] works on mee
Good or not good ingraft, my Merit those
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Shall perfet, and for these my Death shall pay. (PL 11.33-36)127
Postlapsarian man does rather well from the soteriological deal, but the Son’s side of the
bargain is ultimately decidedly equitable too. Man must be ‘ransomed with [Christ’s] own
dear life,’ thereby ‘to redeeme, / So dearly to redeem what Hellish hate / So easily
destroy’d’ (PL 3.297; 299-301). The repetition of ‘redeeme’ reminds us of its resonant
etymology. The Son’s task is unenviable, not least because it involves leaving his position
‘Thron’d in highest bliss / Equal to God, and equally enjoying / God-like fruition’ (PL
3.305-307).
But thirty-three years are nothing compared to eternity, and the rewards for the
Son’s agreeing to incarnation and death are considerable. After his death, Christ will be
‘anointed universal King’ and will ‘assume [His] Merits’ by receiving ‘all Power’ from
God (PL 3.317; 318-19; 317). Soon ‘all knees to [Him] shall bow; of them that bide / In
Heaven, or Earth, or under Earth in Hell’ (PL 3.321-22), and His ego will also be amply
compensated:
I heard the voyce of many Angels, round about the Throne, and the beasts and the
Elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times tenne thousand, and
thousands of thousands, saying with a lowd voice, Worthy is the Lambe that was
slaine, to receive power, and riches, and wisedome, and strength, and honour, and
glory, and blessing. (Rev. 5:11)
Milton makes it clear that while the Son paid man’s debt at a cost to Himself, His
incarnation involves only a relatively momentary deprivation of God’s glory. The Son also
recognises the transient nature of his task:
though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All that of me can die, yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted Soule
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue
127
For an illuminating discussion of Milton’s legal and usurious dealings, see John T. Shawcross, The
Development of Milton’s Thought: Law, Government, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2008), pp.25-48.
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My vanquisher, spoild of his vaunted spoil. (PL 3.245-251)
The Son must pay man’s ‘due,’ but He knows that ultimately He will have first Death’s
‘spoil,’ and then His own numerous rewards on His return to Heaven. Apparent loss is thus
transformed into immense gain, and Milton here follows Mun, who maintains that ‘if we
only behold the actions of the husbandman in the seed-time when we casteth away much
good corn into the ground, we will rather accompt him a mad man than a husbandman: but
when we consider his labours in the harvest which is the end of his endeavours, we find the
worth and plentiful encrease of his actions’ (1664, 50).
The long view is both literal and metaphorical in Adam’s vision from the ‘top / Of
Speculation’ (PL 12.588-9). Hoxby has noted that when Milton wrote, ‘the word
speculation was just taking on its economic meanings as prospective investment: the
OED’s first recorded use in that sense is by John Evelyn in 1666’ (2002, 169), but Milton
often used it in a theological sense, as when he warns in the Christian Doctrine against
moving ‘outside the written authority of scripture, into vague subtleties of speculation’
(CPW 6:134). The natural philosopher Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1664)
described ‘Speculators’ as short-sighted, since they ‘onely gaz’d at the visible effects and
last Resultances of things, [and] understood no more of Nature, than a rude Countreyfellow does of the Internal Fabrick of a Watch, that onely sees the Index and Horary Circle,
and perchance hears the Clock and Alarum strike in it’ (1664, 193).
Adam and Michael’s responses to each of the vignettes seen from Speculation are
initially disparate, with Adam being a speculator in Power’s mould, his reactions
characterised by immediacy and superficiality. Conversely, Michael follows Mun as he
takes – and gradually brings Adam round to – the long view.
After seeing Cain murder Abel, Adam exclaims ‘O Teacher, some great mischief
hath befall’n / To that meek man, who well had sacrific’d; / Is Pietie thus and pure
Devotion paid?’ (PL 11.450-453). Adam’s concerns are articulated in financial terms, as he
worries that Abel’s expenditures of ‘Pietie’ and ‘Devotion’ have not been appropriately
recompensed. Michael responds in kind that there will indeed be a return on Abel’s
spiritual investment, as ‘the bloodie Fact / Will be aveng’d, and [Abel’s] Faith approv’d /
Loose no reward, though here thou see him die’ (PL 11.457-459). But while David
Ainsworth argues that Abel’s death and the subsequent description of the Lazar-house
‘gives the reader every reason to forget that … Christ’s death will provide hope and
salvation to humanity’ (Ainsworth 2008, 106), Abel in fact becomes a forerunner of Christ
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when Michael emphasises that a death ‘rowling in dust and gore’ (PL 11.460) is no
impediment to – indeed, is a necessary condition for –the recouping of a spiritual
investment.
Despite Michael’s reassurances, Adam continues to lament over ‘miserable
Mankind’ (PL 11.500). As Jason Kerr has noted (2013, 15), Adam reconsiders his earlier
arguments against suicide and in favour of childbearing (PL 10.1016-1025; 1050-1053),
now becoming like Satan in his declaration that the terms of man’s agreement with God
are unjust:
Why is life giv’n
To be thus wrested from us? rather why
Obtruded on us thus? who if we knew
What we receive, would either not accept
Life offer’d, or soon beg to lay it down,
Glad to be so dismist in peace. (PL 11.502-507)
But Michael explains that the arrangement is not as unjust as it seems at first. Life need not
be ‘wrested,’ since ‘if thou well observe / The rule of not too much, by temperance taught,
… So maist thou live, till like ripe Fruit thou drop / Into thy Mothers lap’ (PL 11.530-1;
535-6), and in response Adam begins to adopt a more teleological view, as he declares
‘henceforth I flie not Death, nor would prolong / Life much’ (PL 11.547-8).
In Book 4 the command not to eat the fruit and thereby stay alive was an ‘easie
charge’ (PL 4.420) but now Adam sees life as quite the opposite, as he is ‘bent rather how
[he] may be quit / Fairest and easiest of this combrous charge’ (PL 11.548-9). So far, so
Satanic, as we cannot but be reminded here of Satan’s desire to ‘quit / the debt immense of
endless gratitude, / So burthensome’ (PL 4.51-53). Patience was not one of Satan’s virtues,
but Adam is content with a long-term arrangement and happy to render unto God far in the
future the life that was given to him. The charge may be ‘combrous,’ but he will
nevertheless keep it until his ‘appointed day / Of rendring up, and patiently attend / My
dissolution’ (PL 11.550-551).
But while Adam is making progress towards angelic understanding, it is clear that
he still has a tendency to be like Power’s speculator, easily swayed by appearances. The
vision of the discovery of metals, where ‘liquid Ore’ is ‘dreind / Into fit moulds prepar’d’
(PL 11.570-571) appears impressive, but this is undercut by its evocation of the devils’
mining earlier in the poem. Similarly, after seeing ‘a Beavie of fair Women, richly gay / In
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Gems and wanton dress’ singing ‘soft amorous Ditties,’ Adam tells Michael with delight
‘much better seems this Vision, and more hope / Of peaceful dayes portends, then those
two past’ (PL 11.582-3; 584; 599-600).
But again, Michael must remind him to ‘judg not what is best / By pleasure, though
to Nature seeming meet.’ While they seem ‘Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,’
Milton warns us, with characteristic misogyny, ‘yet [they are] empty of all good wherein
consists / Womans domestic honour and chief praise’ (PL 11.603-4; 615-617). Stanley Fish
interprets Michael’s injunction as being to ‘look deeper for the significance of anything
said or done, look to the relationship between actions, words and even thoughts, and the
imperative, always in force, first to discern, and then to do God’s will’ (2012, 7), and this
aptly describes the function of economic imagery in Paradise Lost: although gold is often
associated with Satan, we should not blithely assume that its connections are invariably
negative. We see that it also serves a positive purpose, with Milton continually calling on it
to help him reveal ‘God’s will.’
At the end of Book 11, the vision of Noah allows Adam to understand that loss
should not be mourned if it allows a greater good to emerge. God transformed loss into
profit when he created man to remedy the loss of the fallen angels:
Least [Satan’s] heart exalt him in the harme
Already done, to have dispeopl’d Heav’n
My damage fondly deemed, I can repaire
That detriment, if such it be to lose
Self-lost, and in a moment will create
Another World, out of one man a Race
Of men innumerable. (PL 7.150-156)128
Long-distance trade operates according to a cyclical dynamic of expense and profit, and so
too does creation in Paradise Lost. The angels were created, then some were lost, leading
God to create man. Man was created and fell, leading ultimately to the Son’s incarnation,
and the corruption of antediluvian man led God to ‘set open … all the Cataracts / Of
Heav’n,’ but to follow with ‘a Covenant never to destroy / The Earth again by flood’ (PL
128
Satan himself wonders in Book 2 if God created man ‘to supply / Perhaps our vacant room’ (PL 2.834-5)
and does so again in Book 9:
To repaire his numbers thus impair’d, …
Or to spite us more,
[God] determin’d to advance into our room
A Creature form’d of Earth. (PL 9.144; 147-149)
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11.825; 824; 892-3). In an apt parallel, the created speaks like the creator in Adam’s
assessment of the Flood:
Farr less I now lament for one whole World
Of wicked Sons destroyd, then I rejoyce
For one Man found so perfet and so just,
That God voutsafes to raise another World
From him, and all his anger to forget. (PL 11.874-878)
The economic ideas evoked here are made more explicit in Book 12, where Christ’s
atonement, as in the Christian Doctrine, is represented as the repayment of a debt. As we
saw in Chapter 1, John Preston believed that man was unable to keep the Mosaic Law ‘not
because there is any imperfection in the Law,’ but rather due to ‘the weaknesse of the
flesh’ (1629, 74). Milton goes further, fully ‘separat[ing] the Gospel with its promise from
the Law, whose stipulations are for Israelites alone, and whose discipline he dismisses as
slavish and childish’ (D. N. C. Wood 2001, xviii). Michael explains that the ‘Law was
given [to men] to evince / Thir natural pravitie, by stirring up / Sin against Law to fight’
(PL 12.287-289), but God did this not from malice, but so man could understand that his
own payments to God were not substantial enough to satisfy the agreement.
Man’s spiritual coffers are too meagre to meet the repayments required for sin and
the ‘bloud of Bulls and Goats’ (PL 12.292) will not satisfy. What is needed instead is the
blood of the Lamb:
Some bloud more precious must be paid for Man,
Just for unjust, that in such righteousness
To them by Faith imputed, they may finde
Justification towards God, and peace
Of Conscience. (PL 12.293-297)
Adam now shows signs of moving towards an economic understanding of redemption, as
he delights to think ‘needs must the Serpent now his capital bruise / Expect with mortal
paine’ (PL 12.383). The primary meaning of ‘capital’ here is rooted in its Latin etymology,
but Milton’s learned readers would also have been familiar with its economic meaning.
The first instance of the word being used in the latter sense is in Randle Cotgrave’s
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Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), where it is defined as ‘wealth,
worth; a stocke, a man’s principall, or chiefe substance’ (1611, 78).129
Michael reinforces this economic reading by explaining the mechanism of the
atonement. It is not, as Adam supposes (PL 12.384-5), a literal fight, but instead Christ’s
agreeing to ‘pay a debt’ (Nuttall 1998, 165) that man cannot afford alone. Milton’s
commitment to an economic soteriology is nowhere more evident than in his decision to
represent the atonement, the linchpin of his entire theodicy, as the repayment of a debt:
Thy Saviour, shall recure,
Not by destroying Satan, but his works
In thee and thy Seed: nor can this be,
But by fulfilling that which thou didst want,
Obedience to the Law of God, impos’d
On penaltie of death, and suffering death,
The penaltie to thy transgression due,
And due to theirs which out of thine will grow:
So onely can high Justice rest appaid. (PL 12.393-401)
Stella Revard has noted the circularity of the way ‘the second Adam pays the penalty for
the sins of Adam and Eve’ (2005, 100), and this is echoed by Eve’s recognition that
‘though all by mee is lost, / Such favour I unworthy am voutsaft, / By mee the Promis’d
Seed shall all restore’ (PL 12.621-623). This understanding of the long view, the
recognition that loss can be transformed into gain, is, for Milton’s economic soteriology,
‘the summe / Of wisdom’ (PL 12.575-576).
This economic soteriology underpins both the Christian Doctrine and Paradise
Lost. When reading the Christian Doctrine we are reminded of the earlier English covenant
theologians discussed in Chapter 1, who wrote with one hand on the Bible and the other on
their ledgers. Milton certainly saw man’s relationship with God through mercantile eyes,
with man’s love of God becoming a ‘service rendered’ which is worthless if not freely
given. The Christian Doctrine outlines the price of redemption; to escape his debt to God,
fallen man must be contrite and repentant, and if these conditions are met, Jesus can
intercede on his behalf and pay the debt.
129
We can assume its use in this sense predates the Dictionarie, for it must have already been in use to be
worthy of inclusion. The idea of capital itself – then referred to as ‘stock’ – had arrived in England from
Europe in the sixteenth century (Boldizzoni 2008, 12).
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These ideas are developed more fully in Paradise Lost, where Milton’s attitudes to
economic ideas are more complex than have been hitherto supposed by critics. There are
certainly negative aspects to the economic imagery of the poem, but these have been rather
overemphasised by Hoxby. A more attentive reading of Paradise Lost reveals that Milton
relies on the language of debt, investment, and profit to expound his soteriology. Milton
adopts the rhetoric of economic thinkers such as Mun and Misselden to bring the reader,
with Adam, to prioritise final results over intermediate losses. Moreover, by presenting
man as in thrall to his own appetites and reliant on external intervention for salvation,
Milton sets the stage for his next published work, the History of Britain.
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Chapter 6
‘As Wine and Oyl are Imported to us from abroad: so must ripe Understanding, and
many civil Vertues’: The Fallen State in the History of Britain
It is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest
possible mixed European race.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (2004, 229)
Jonathan Israel has identified 1647-1672, which almost exactly matches the period of
composition of the History of Britain, as a time when the English ‘were concerned as a
matter of great urgency with the problem of Dutch economic superiority, and which sought
England’s economic salvation in a wide-ranging protectionist system’ (1997, 308). But the
Navigation Act of 1651 proved difficult to enforce, a problem exacerbated by the lax
quality controls in the domestic production of English goods. In 1652, Benjamin Worsley
lamented the ‘carelessness of this nation, in keeping our manufactures to their due
contents, weight and goodness,’ and he claimed the contrast between Dutch diligence and
English negligence was ‘the cause of the so great thriving of our neighbour’s cloathing,
and of the so great ruine and decaie (on the contrarie) of our own’ (1652, 9). A number of
English political and economic tracts written during the 1650s and 1660s adopt a similar
position to Worsley, with xenophobic mistrust of the Dutch gradually giving way to a
grudging admiration and a desire to emulate.130 We see this attitude at points in the Readie
and Easie Way131 and it is crucial to the narrative trajectory of the History of Britain. This
chapter will begin by examining a number of economic tracts of the 1650s and 1660s,
showing how there was a clamour for the nation to be more accommodating to foreigners
in light of the improvement of domestic institutions they could facilitate. I will then
demonstrate how the History sees Milton coming to the same conclusions; he reconfigures
soteriology in national terms to depict a nation, mired in corruption, covetousness, and
cowardice, who must look beyond their borders for salvation.
130
A representative example is Thomas Violet’s The Advancement of Merchandize or, Certain Propositions
for the Improvment of the Trade of this Common-wealth (1651), which called for England to be more
accommodating of ‘merchant strangers’ because Amsterdam and Genoa had achieved economic success by
treating foreigners with ‘equal privileges with their own natives’ (1651, 2–3).
131
Milton urges the English to ‘look to our neighbours the United Provinces, to us inferior in all outward
advantages; who not withstanding, in the midst of greater difficulties, courageously, wisely, constantly went
through the same work, and are settled in all the happie enjoiments of a potent and flourishing republic to this
day’ (CPW 7:423).
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The tension between mistrust and admiration of the Dutch is embodied by George
Downing, one of the most important economic figures of the Restoration. He inhabited the
liminal space between patriotism and pragmatism, as ‘though he hated the Dutch, he
recognised quite frankly their merits and was not to be deluded or, apparently, even bribed
into supporting economic patriotism where the facts did not warrant it’ (Wilson 1957,
101).
This attitude is apparent in the time Downing spent in the United Provinces as an
envoy in the 1650s, where he established a network of spies and studied Dutch economic
and financial practices. He attributed Dutch trading success to their high excise and low
customs, which was the inverse of the English system at the time. His time in the United
Provinces proved crucial, as it was ‘his situation outside the country [which] exposed him
to the European perspective upon English fiscal and military weakness’ (Scott 2003, 337).
Accordingly, in a letter to John Thurloe in 1659 he advised ‘not to spend your time about
vaine questions and janglings which profit not’, but that ‘the playne truth is, if you will be
able to pay taxes, you must lower your customs very greatly, and raise it by way of excise’
(Clark 1992, 3:177-8).
Shortly before the Restoration, Downing wrote to Charles II to excuse his service
of the Protectorate, claiming he had ‘sucked in principles that since his reason had made
him see were erroneous’ (Carte 1759, 1:319). He was knighted upon the Restoration, and
was reassigned to The Hague to fulfil a similar service as before. While Downing’s service
of both the Protectorate and the Restored monarchy was not unusual among his peers, his
disdain for loyalty was demonstrated by his engineering of the arrest in Holland of three
regicides, Miles Corbet, John Barkstead, and John Okey, the latter of whom was
Downing’s former commander and sponsor. In the entry covering this event, Pepys
concisely summarises the general sentiment in his description of how ‘all the world takes
notice of [Downing] for a most ungrateful villain for his pains’ (Pepys 1971, 3: 17 March
1662). Indeed, Downing’s infamy spread much further afield, as in New England ‘it
became a proverbial expression, to say of a false man who betrayed his trust, that he was
an arrant George Downing’ (Hutchinson 1936, 97). While Downing may have taken the
disregard of ideological loyalty to a rather unpalatable extreme, nevertheless his ‘lasting
contribution to England's economic destiny was that he brought to bear his observation of
Dutch economic practice on English economic theory and policy’ (Wilson 1957, 95)
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Downing’s views swiftly gained currency in England, and it became clear that a
crucial factor in the economic success of the Dutch, a mystery which had eluded English
economic thinkers for so long, was the greater freedoms granted by the States. Soon even
Josiah Child, one of the founders of the East Africa Company and the largest stockholder
in the East India Company, attributed Dutch trading superiority to ‘their toleration of
different opinions in matters of religion: by reason whereof many industrious people of
other countreys, that dissent from the established churches of their own government, resort
to them with their families and estates, and after a few years cohabitation with them,
become of the same common interest’ (Child 1668, 5).
These dynamics of trade are crucial to Milton’s historiographical approach. The
essential function of trade is to allow a nation to address its deficiencies by ridding itself of
superfluities. Milton adopts a similar methodology regarding his sources in the History,
taking what is required and discarding whatever is unnecessary. Wherever possible, he
avoids embellished historical accounts, and when he has no alternative but to include them,
he does so with the caveat of scepticism. Nevertheless, he feels that even dubious sources
have their value, as they may in time be shown to possess some truth, or at least provide
inspiration for future writers (CPW 5.1:3). This willingness to engage with sources usually
viewed in a negative light reflects the willingness of English economic thinkers of the
Restoration to draw on Dutch ideas.
Such contrast is also present in the disparate nature of the sources used in the
History, where accounts of the purported mythological origins of the Britons sit alongside
vicious excoriations of a failed nation. While this may seem inconsistent, it is apt that a
national history which oscillates between invasion and assimilation should juxtapose
historiographical styles in the creation of an overarching narrative.
The different facets of Milton’s historiography can be elucidated by exploring his
historiographical precedents, the most important of which is Gildas’ De excidio et
conquestu britanniae. Gildas is the historian with whom Milton feels most affinity, and De
excidio was utilised by figures from all points of the political, religious, and
historiographical spectrum.
In Britannia (1586), William Camden adopts a historiographical approach which is
concerned above all with accurate sources and material evidence. One might, therefore,
expect Camden to have little use for Gildas’ De excidio, a text which is ‘in no way a
history, nor written with any object a historian may have … it is a message or a sermon …
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containing historical portions … [which] are coloured by their author’s main purport as a
Christian moralist’ (Williams 1875, v-vi). The overtly rhetorical function of De excidio jars
with Camden’s distaste for editorialised histories. Yet, in his pursuit of sources as
contemporary as possible to the events they report, he has no choice but to cite Gildas
‘who then lived and was an eie witnesse’ (Camden 1634, 113), just as Milton’s desire to
treat prehistoric Britain in the History forced him to ‘bestow the telling over ev’n of these
reputed Tales’ (CPW 5.1:3).
Despite Gildas’ evident bias, Camden maintains that De excidio still possesses
value. He recognised that historiography which is contemporary to the events it reports will
inevitably be coloured by those events, and he consequently urges his reader ‘let us not be
offended and displeased with good Gildas, for his bitter invectives against either the vices
of his owne countrey-men the Britans, or the inhumane outrages of the barbarous enemies,
or the insatiable crueltie of our fore-fathers the Saxons’ (Camden 1634, 110). This
anticipates Milton’s similar plea in the History that ‘oft-times relations, heretofore
accounted fabulous, have been afterwards found to contain in them many footsteps and
reliques of something true’ (CPW 5.1:3).
Gildas’ influence on Camden extends to their shared use of paralepsis, a rhetorical
technique which Joannes Susenbrotus defines as ‘when we pass over something, not to
know it or not to wish to say it when it is something we wish above all to say’ (Sonnino
1968, 135). In his discussion of the paganism of the early Britons, Gildas claimed ‘I shall
not name the mountains and hills, and rivers, once so pernicious … on which … a blind
people heaped divine honours’ (Gildas 2002, 18), just as Camden maintained ‘neither will
I speake of [the Britons’] ancient religion, which is not verily to be counted religion, but a
most lamentable and confused chaos of superstitions … when Satan had drowned the true
doctrine in thicke mists of darkenesse’ (Camden 1634, 31). He goes on to comment that
‘the ugly spectres of Britaine (saith that Gildas) were meere diabolicall, exceeding well
neere in number those of Egypt’ (Camden 1634, 31).
Gildas was also utilised in the religious debates of the period. John Bramhall may
broadly be characterised as an Anglican apologist, and he drew on Gildas and Bede to
defend the national faith against its opponents, emphasising that ‘if Gildas or Bede have
spoken any thing to the prejudice of the Britons, it was not intended against the whole
nation but against particular persons’ (Bramhall 1658, 317). Bramhall’s polemical defences
of Anglicanism are heavily reliant on appeals to the past and he was firmly opposed to the
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notion that anything substantially new had been introduced into the Church of England.
Rather, he stressed the continuity of the character of the Church, which he argued was
subject to a continual process of improvement through the removal of negative superfluity:
‘the Church of England before the Reformation and the Church of England after the
Reformation are as much the same church as a garden before it is weeded and after it is
weeded is the same garden’ (Bramhall 1842, 1:113). This has something in common with
Milton’s view of national identity in the History, where the invasions that are perceived as
catastrophic ruptures – as the Reformation was by Catholics – in fact gradually refine the
national character, stripping away the aboriginal accretions of vice.
Bramhall’s discussion of the negative assessments of the Britons groups together
‘venerable Bede, and Gildas, and Fox in his Acts and Monuments, [who] brand the Britons
for wicked men, making them as good as atheists’ (Bramhall 1658, 317). This association
of Bede and Gildas with Foxe’s Acts and Monuments invokes martyrdom, and indeed,
Gildas suggests that God responded to the persecution of Christians by ‘sav[ing] Britain
being plunged deep into the thick darkness of black night; for he lit for us the brilliant
lamps of holy martyrs’ (Gildas 2002, 19). While one would expect a monk to be outraged
by Christian executions, Gildas takes the teleological view that the martyrs’ deaths had ‘the
greatest effect in instilling the blaze of divine charity in the minds of beholders’ (Gildas
2002, 19). Similarly, Foxe’s aim in Acts and Monuments was to detail the sufferings of
Protestant martyrs in order to demonstrate that the Reformation was an act of theological
purification, not innovation.
Gildas was even pressed into the service of mythologizing histories, to which he
was emphatically opposed. In 1676, Britannia antiqua illustrata, or, The antiquities of
ancient Britain derived from the Phoenicians was putatively written and published by
Aylett Sammes. His authorship was questioned by contemporaries, who were suspicious of
this ‘impertinent, girning and pedantical coxcomb’ that could not ‘give any account of
authors that are quoted in the said Britannia Antiqua Illustrata’ (Wood 1813, 2:363).
While Sammes follows in the mythologising historiographical tradition of ascribing to the
Britons venerable classical origins, he does so in an unusual fashion. Rather than the
traditional identification with Brutus, the Britannia antiqua illustrata proposes that Britain
was originally settled by Phoenicians.
Sammes’s historiographical approach is quite at odds with Camden’s focus on
contemporary evidence or Milton’s concern for the accuracy of his sources. He recognises
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the esteem in which Camden was held, and that ‘by some it is thought a piece of weakness
only to dissent from him; however it be, I have chose rather to follow that which seems to
the best of my judgment to be truth’ (Sammes 1676, iv). Yet, Sammes is aware that his
conception of truth may not accord with that of his audience, and he excuses himself thus:
‘in this intricate and obscure study of antiquity, it is thought praise-worthy somewhat to
erre; and remember we should withal, that such things as at the first sight being slightly
thought upon are deemed false, after a better review, and further consideration, oftentimes
seem true’ (Sammes 1676, iv).
While taking a different approach from Camden, Sammes does not wish that ‘the
credit of so fair an hypothesis should depend upon so weak an authority [i.e. his own]’
(Sammes 1676, 4). Instead, he draws on Geographia Sacra (1646), a text written by
‘Bochartus, a learned Frenchman in this last age’ which claimed to detail the journeys of
the Phoenicians (Sammes 1676, 5). Although his thesis begins on rather shaky ground,
Sammes intriguingly emphasises the centrality of economic factors to his argument.
Beginning from John Leland’s suggestion that the ‘main body of … the British and Welch
language … consisteth of Hebrew and Greek words’, Sammes wonders
How it should come to pass that the ancient Britains could have any commerce with
the Jews, who where never known to send out colonies, and of all people in the
world were most fond of their own country; certainly I concluded, this could
proceed from no other root but the commerce of the Phoenicians with this nation,
who using the same language with the children of Israel in Canaan, even in those
primitive times were great traders and skilful mariners, and sent out their colonies
through the world. (Sammes 1676, iv)
Sammes goes on to suggest that the Phoenicians implemented a primitive form of
monopolistic legislation, as they ‘studiously concealed this treasure [Britain] from the
world, being exceeding jealous, lest the source and head of their trade being discovered,
the busie Graecians might put in for sharers … by a publick edict of those states, care was
taken to prevent it’ (1676, 2). Sadly, this intriguing starting point comes to nothing as he
goes on to base his argument on a number of spurious etymological derivations rather than
supplying any concrete evidence for his claims. Sammes’s discussion of the gods of the
ancient Britons is rife with false etymologies, and he attempts to legitimise his argument
by emphasising ‘that these sorts of ridiculous spectres were worshipped in Britain, I have
172
shewn out of Gildas’ (Sammes 1676, 138). He goes on to discuss the ‘names, originals,
and offices [and] from what country [these gods] were derived … by which circumstances
it will more evidently appear the great confinity and alliance once made between these
nations’ (Sammes 1676, 125).
When discussing the corruption of the Saxon clergy later in the text, Sammes
mentions that his source is ‘Gildas himself,’ crucially, ‘as it is most elegantly translated by
Mr. Milton’ (Sammes 476). Thus, we see that Sammes was familiar with Milton’s use of
Gildas in the History. One of the central themes of the History is the native assimilation of
practices and ideologies imported by economically motivated invaders. While the specifics
of Sammes’s argument are spurious, it is interesting to note that the fundamental structure
of his thesis – that Britain is a product of the economically motivated colonisation in the
past – bears a remarkable similarity to that traced in the History six years earlier.
It is clear, then, that Gildas was a crucial source for diverse types of intellectual
endeavour in this period, and was used to imbue any argument with legitimacy. His
importance in historical texts is rooted in his relative contemporaneity to the events he
reports, although his patently unhistorical approach frustrated Camden’s newer school of
historiographers. Figures such as Sammes, who were not so concerned with
historiographical accuracy and disdained respected historians like Camden, still used
Gildas to buttress their arguments. Even though Sammes lacked historiographical rigour,
his mention of the economic motivation of invasions gives his text value, albeit more by
accident than design.
The contemporary utilisation of Gildas provides a valuable illustration of the
historiographical milieu in which Milton was writing, an environment which produced an
incredibly diverse range of texts. The History was composed during a period of great
national flux, when economic concerns were intimately related to conceptions of national
security and identity. The gradual subordination of stubborn ideological loyalty to
teleologically-minded pragmatism occurred in tandem with both the proliferation of
toleration and the realisation of the benefits of free trade.
The United Provinces provided the model for many of these ideological
innovations, and the concept of the entrepôt is crucial to the History. Rather than focusing
on the export of a sole domestic product, the Amsterdam entrepôt served as a storehouse of
difficult to obtain, high value commodities such as spice and precious metals. By
stockpiling such commodities, the Dutch could smooth over the vicissitudes of supply and
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demand by providing a ready source of rare commodities to those who required them,
allowing each nation to address its economic deficiencies with greater ease.
One of Milton’s contemporaries, Thomas Fuller, suspected that because ‘some
readers will be out of breath in going along with the long-winded style of Gildas, (the
excusable fault of the age he lived in) I crave leave to divide his long and entire sentence,
for the better understanding thereof, into severall parcells, without the least addition
thereto, or alteration thereof’ (Fuller 1659, 51). In the History, analogously, Milton draws a
diverse range of sources together in order to spare his reader the tedium of ‘rakeing in the
Foundations of old Abbies and Cathedrals’ (CPW 5.1:230). He seeks to create a
historiographical entrepôt, which, by virtue of its increased ease of access, will facilitate
with greater ease the process of national instruction and refinement, with the ultimate aim
of preventing ‘the Revolution of like Calamities’ (CPW 5.1:403).
The opening of the History demonstrates the overlap of historiography and
nationhood, as the lack of reliable historical records rendered Britain’s very existence
questionable to classical commentators. There was doubt in the classical world regarding
Britain, ‘the reported extent of which had made its existence a matter of controversy
among historians, many of whom questioned whether it were not a mere name and fiction,
not a real place’ (Plutarch 1939, 2:548). Milton too is reduced to mere conjecture as he
wonders whether Britain had ‘her dwellers, her affairs, and perhaps her stories, eev’n in
that old World … before the Flood,’ and he has no choice but to ‘bestow the telling over
ev’n of these reputed Tales’ (CPW 5.1:4; 3).
One such ‘reputed tale’ concerns Dunwallo, who ‘came into prominence because of
his courage’ (Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966, 88) and was ‘the first in Britain that wore a
Crown of Gold; and therfore by som reputed the first King’ (CPW 5.1:27). In light of
Milton’s dislike of royal ‘garnish’ (CPW 3:339) in Eikonoklastes, one might expect him to
criticise Dunwallo’s use of gold, but he instead records Dunwallo’s purported creation of
the Molmutine Laws, ‘famous among the English to this day’ (CPW 5.1:27). Here, gold
represents the power which made possible Dunwallo’s ‘subjugat[ion of] the entire island’
(Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966, 89), making ‘such riddance of Theeves and Robbers, that all
passages were safe’ (CPW 5.1:28). Gold’s symbolism of both avarice and power is thus not
necessarily negative, and this hermeneutical instability recalls Paradise Lost, reminding us
that ‘for over fifteen years … [Milton] bore [Paradise Lost and the History] in his mind
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side by side. Seed-thoughts and suggestions for the one must have had their share in
shaping and colouring the other’ (Glicksman 1922, 475).
Milton is glad to escape the ‘obscure pre-Roman period so full of unsupported
legends and superstitions’ (French 1935, 472), and his relief at the end of Book 1 is
palpable: ‘like one who had set out on his way by night, and travail’d through a Region of
smooth or idle Dreams, our History now arrives on the Confines, where day-light and truth
meet us with a cleer dawn, representing to our view, though at a farr distance, true colours
and shapes’ (CPW 5.1:37).
But while historiographical light was approaching, Britain was still mired in civic
darkness when the Romans arrived. While Milton came to support federalised government,
the ancient Britons were autonomous but isolated, ‘under many princes and states, not
confederate or consulting in common, but mistrustfull, and oft-times warring one with the
other, which gave them up one by one an easie conquest to the Romans’ (CPW 5.1:60).
This causal connection between civic vice and weakness is reiterated by Nicholas von
Maltzahn: ‘courageous and warlike, the early Britons nonetheless suffer from a lack of
civic … discipline, and therefore must submit to the Roman invasion’ (1991, 112).
The Romans’ reasons for invading were partially economic, but they were not the
first to do so, as Julius Caesar described how ‘the coastal areas belong to people who once
crossed from Belgium in search of booty’ (Caesar 1998, 95). In the twelfth century, Henry
of Huntingdon noted in his Historia anglorum that ‘because of Britain’s pre-eminent
wealth, it excites the spite and jealousy of all its neighbours. Therefore it has been
frequently conquered, and even more frequently attacked’ (Henry of Huntingdon 1996,
29), and ‘except Merchants and Traders, it is not oft, saith [Caesar], that any use to Travel
thether’ (CPW 5.1:42). However, British commodities were not always taken by force in
this period; rather, they were more often ‘fetch’t away by Foren Merchants: thir dealing,
saith Diodorus, plaine and simple without fraude’ (CPW 5.1:60).132
Milton muses on Caesar’s possible motivations for invading: ‘a desire of adding
still more glory to his name, and the whole Roman Empire to his ambition, som say, with a
farr meaner and ignobler [motive], the desire of Brittish Pearls, whose bigness he
delighted to ballance in his hand’ (CPW 5.1:41-2). This recognition of the conquest’s
economic dimension is supported by the fact that ‘the Britans in most of his Gallian Warrs
132
As we saw in Chapter 3, the ancient Britons are quite unlike seventeenth-century Russians in this regard.
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had sent supplies against him’ (CPW 5.1:42; Caesar 1998, 79), and in his Gallic War,
Caesar pointedly details British resources: ‘[The Britons] have large herds of cattle. They
use either bronze or gold coinage or, instead of currency, iron rods of a fixed weight. Tin is
found in the midland regions, iron along the coast but only in small quantities. Their
bronze is imported. Timber of all kinds is found as in Gaul, except for beech and silver fir’
(Caesar 1998, 95). However, despite the frequent visitations of traders to Britain, the
country was ‘eev’n to the Gauls thir Neighbours almost unknown’ (CPW 5.1:42). Caesar
was consequently ‘unable to ascertain either the size of the island, the nature and numbers
of the peoples living there, their skill in warfare, their established customs, or which
harbours were suitable for a fleet of fairly large ships’ (Caesar 1998, 80). He entrusted
Caius Volusenus with the task of ‘mak[ing] discovery [of Britain] … with command to
return as soon as this could be effected’ (CPW 5.1:43). Analogously, Satan is a ‘scout’
who traverses the void to reconnoitre the rumoured new world, ‘Obtain[ing] the brow of
some high-climbing hill, / Which to his eye discovers unaware / The goodly prospect of
some forein land’ (PL 3.543; 546-8).
E. L. Marilla expands this colonialist parallel between Paradise Lost and the
History by suggesting Eden is the symbolic site of a power struggle between native and
foreign forces: ‘[In Paradise Lost] Milton was thinking not primarily of an isolated region
inhabited by two persons but, rather, of the domain of men who seek to preserve a free
society’ (Marilla 1968, 15). Such a reading invites a consideration of the nature of a ‘free
society’, and, in particular, how freedom is utilised in the absence of external rule. This is
particularly pertinent to the conduct of the Romans while in Britain. Caesar was not wholly
dismissive of the uncouth Britons, but rather follows Nennius’ assertion that ‘truth … does
not despise the jewel which she has rescued from the mud, but she adds it to her former
treasures’ (Nennius 2004, 2). Caesar recognised the unsuitability of Roman triremes to the
tempestuous waters of the English Channel, and later used British coracle designs in his
civil war against Pompey (Williams 1875, 290). This Roman willingness to adapt to
effective British practices is found from their first landing, when the Britons assaulted the
Romans ‘eev’n under thir Ships; with such a bold, and free hardihood, that Caesar himself
… denies not but that the terrour of such new and resolute opposition made [the Romans]
forget thir wonted valour’ (CPW 5.1:44-5). It soon became clear the Roman mode of
disciplined, organised warfare was ‘not so well fitted against this kind of Enemy; for that
the Foot in heavy Armour could not follow thir cunning flight, and durst not by ancient
Discipline stirr from thir Ensigne’ (CPW 5.1:53).
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Even in this first battle we see the bi-directional process of cultural osmosis taking
place, as ‘Scæva a Roman Souldier’ broke ranks and ‘press’d too farr among the Britans,
and besett round, after incredible valour shewn, single against a multitude, swom back safe
to his General’ (CPW 5.1:45-6). Given the early stage of exposure to British practices,
however, Scæva remained cognisant of his Roman sense of duty, and immediately
‘besought pardon for his rash adventure against Discipline … [yet] such a deed wherin
valour, and ingenuity so out-weigh’d transgression, easily made amends and preferr’d him
to be a Centurion’ (CPW 5.1:46). Similarly, Satan assures Eve that she will not be
punished for eating the fruit:
Will God incense His ire
For such a petty Trespass, and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of Death denounc’t[?] (PL 9.692-5)
While Scæva eschews the Roman continence Milton admired in favour of the British
indiscipline which he abhorred, the historian must reluctantly concede that this was a
positive action in light of its pragmatic success.
The first sustained British attempt to exercise autonomy is the Boudican rebellion,
and Milton’s treatment of the insurrection questions the British capacity for selfgovernance, juast as he had in the 1650s. The notion of a woman leading the Britons was
most irksome to Milton, and he ‘could not forgive the ancient Britons their unmanly ways,
a recurrent symptom of which was “the uncomeliness of thir Subjection to the Monarchie
of a Woeman”’ (Le Comte 1947, 978). Milton correlates this uncomely subjection with the
sloppy military conduct of the British, as
in this Battel, and whole business, the Britans never more plainly manifested
themselves to be right Barbarians; no rule, no foresight, no forecast, experience or
estimation, either of themselves or of thir Enemies; such confusion, such
impotence, as seem’d likest not to a Warr, but to the wild hurrey of a distracted
Woeman, with as mad a Crew at her heeles. (CPW 5.1:80)
The Boudican rebels’ destruction of normative gender identifiers is gruesomely manifested
in their mutilation of ‘Roman Wives and Virgins’, who were ‘hang’d up all naked, [and]
had thir Breasts cut off, and sow’d to thir mouthes’ (CPW 5.1:78).
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This ignobility is further evident in the base motivations for the uprising. While the
rebellion was precipitated by unjust treatment at the hands of the Romans, the antityrannical sentiment which Milton believed to be an admirable cause for rebellion is,
crucially, absent. Rather, the decision to revolt is rooted in the deprivations of status,
power, and money that occurred after the death of Prasutagus: ‘his Kingdome became a
prey to Centurions, his House to rav’ning officers … the wealthiest of his Subjects …
thrown out of thir Estates’ (CPW 5.1:76). These degradations of rank led the Britons to
‘[band] themselves to a general revolt,’ and as Milton astutely asked in Of Reformation,
‘what stirs the Englishman … sooner to rebellion, then violent and heavy hands upon their
goods and purses?’ (CPW 5.1:76; 1.591). It is clear that the economic motivations which
impel the foreign invasions of the History are similarly present in civil uprisings.
Julius Agricola recognised the connection between economic factors and the
outbreak of war, and so he set about ‘cutting off the causes from whence Warr arises’
(CPW 5.1:84). To this end, he ‘began reformation from his own house; permitted not his
attendants and followers to sway, or have to doe at all in public affairs’ (CPW 5.1:84-5). In
light of Charles II’s delegation of power to favourites who exploited their positions to the
national detriment, Milton would certainly find Agricola’s firm separation of personal and
national affairs laudable.
Agricola also redressed the abuses of merchants who manipulated the markets by
withholding commodities such as corn, ‘causing a Dearth, where none was’ (CPW 5.1:84)
to drive up prices. It was also clear that extortionate, arbitrary taxation on corn was
damaging trade, and consequently Agricola ‘lai[d] on with equallitie the proportions of
corn and tribute that were impos’d, [took] off exactions, and the Fees of encroaching
Officers, heavier then the tribute itself’ (CPW 5.1:85). The various innovations
implemented by Agricola ultimately ‘brought peace into some credit; which before, since
the Romans coming, had as ill a name as war’ (CPW 5.1:85).
However, 150 years into the occupation, the Romans were making their own ill
name. The fragility of Scævan decorum became evident after the departure of Ulpius
Marcellus, a Governor of Britain whom Milton describes as ‘a man endu’d with all
nobleness of mind, frugal, temperate, mild, and magnanimous’ (CPW 5.1:99). After
Marcellus left for Rome in 200 AD, ‘the Roman Legions fell to sedition among
themselves; 15 hundred of them went to Rome in name of the rest, and were so terrible to
Commodus … [that] they endeavour’d heer to set up another Emperor against him’ (CPW
178
5.1:99).133 Order and formality had been a fundamental tenet of Roman society for
centuries, and the Romans stationed in Britain were unsure how to act once such strictures
had been removed. The remorseful sense of duty which stung Scæva was wholly absent as
they indulged their baser appetites, becoming ‘Roman in name, but not by law and custom’
(Gildas 2002, 20).
Roman rule played a crucial role in the initiation of national progression in various
fields, and Milton recognised that ‘[The Romans] beate us into some civilitie; likely else to
have continu’d longer in a barbarous and savage manner of life’ (CPW 5.1:61). Yet, the
conduct of the Romans early in the occupation, and their facilitation of civic and economic
advances, forms a profound contrast with the degeneracy of the last Romans stationed in
Britain. The process of cultural osmosis continued to such a point that, while the Britons
had slowly adopted Miltonically laudable practices, the Romans began to be corrupted by
the more dissolute tendencies of the Britons, which led to a gradual regression into petty
squabbles and struggles for power. Thus it is apparent that the possibility of degeneration
inheres in all cultures, even those that are held up as the pinnacle of sophistication. While
innovative thinkers of the seventeenth century highlighted the potential value of demonised
figures, so too the converse formulation becomes apparent here: the History suggests that
unquestioning veneration of the practices of a revered nation can be dangerous,
emphasising that actions must always be assessed on a pragmatic, rather than an
ideological, basis.
The text repeatedly demonstrates the risks of the complete removal of authority,
instead stressing the necessity of a gradual process of transition. This concept is nowhere
more clearly demonstrated than in the period following the Roman withdrawal. While the
withdrawal removed the foreign yoke under which the nation had been held for centuries,
such freedom is not as unambiguously beneficial as it may first appear.
Over the course of the occupation, the Romans provided the Britons with examples
to be both emulated and abhorred, and the fundamental issue at this stage is whether the
Britons had developed the Miltonic acuity to distinguish between the two. Had they
133
Commodus was renowned in classical histories for his tyranny. He believed himself to be the
reincarnation of Hercules and often set up sadistic contests for himself in the arena. A representative example
is when he gathered ‘all the men in the city who had lost their feet as the result of disease or some accident,
and then, after fastening about their knees some likenesses of serpents' bodies, and giving them sponges to
throw instead of stones, … killed them with blows of a club, pretending that they were giants’ (Cassius Dio
1927, 9:114). Milton was evidently familiar with Cassius Dio since he cites him elsewhere in the History as
an authority on Roman history, so it is strange that he passes over Cassius Dio’s account and instead depicts
Commodus as a victim.
179
assimilated enough civic and economic knowledge to progress into well-regulated selfgovernment, or would they regress into their old barbaric, bickering, profligate ways? The
actions of the Britons at this crucial juncture shape the rest of the History, and their
decision is succinctly articulated in Paradise Lost: ‘To stand or fall / Free in thine own
Arbitrement it lies’ (PL 8.640-1).
The departure of the Romans left the Britons, for the first time in generations, with
the monumental task of civil autonomy. The Britons struggled to wield their new
independence, and
Seem’d a while to bestir them with a shew of diligence in thir new affairs, som
secretly aspiring to rule, others adoring the name of liberty, yet so soon as they felt
by proof the weight of what it was to govern well themselves, and what was
wanting within them, not stomach or the love of licence, but the wisdom, the virtue,
the labour, to use and maintain true libertie, they soon remitted thir heat, and
shrunk more wretchedly under the burden of thir own libertie, than before under a
foren yoke. (CPW 5:131)
This resonates with Samson Agonistes, where the eponymous character bemoans ‘nations
grown corrupt’ that prefer ‘bondage with ease than strenuous liberty’ (SA 268; 271), and
Harry Glicksman has rightly observed that ‘to become a sluggard in an hour of ease, or a
voluptuary in an hour of affluence, or a tyrant in an hour of authority – these, [Milton] is
convinced, are perils that never fail to beset the race of man’ (Glicksman 1922, 474).
One of the most immediate consequences of the Roman withdrawal was the
complete removal of the military forces which had repelled Britain’s enemies for four
centuries. The Britons were quickly beset by ‘those ravenous multitudes who minded only
spoil’ (CPW 5.1:132), and, like ‘frightened chicks huddling under the wings of their
faithful parents’ (Gildas 2002, 22), entreated the Romans to return.134 The Romans took
pity on the beleaguered Britons and came back to ‘instruct them in the art of Warr, leaving
Patterns of thir Arms and Weapons behind them; and with animating words, and many
lessons of valour to a faint-hearted audience, bid them finally farewell, without purpose to
return’ (CPW 5.1:133).
134
We are reminded here of Matthew 23:37: ‘O Hierusalem, Hierusalem, thou that killest the Prophets, and
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and yee would not?’
180
Following the Roman withdrawal, the centralised organisation of the nation rapidly
broke down, and each kingdom became isolated and engaged in petty squabbles with its
neighbours. This civic regression was also economically manifested, as a famine at this
time led to ‘discord and civil commotion among the Britans: each man living by what he
rob’d or took violently from his Neighbour. When all stores were consum’d and spent
where men inhabited, they betook them to the Woods, and liv’d by hunting, which was thir
only sustainment’ (CPW 5.1:135).
The Roman occupation had largely restrained the British predilection for
bellicosity, albeit with occasional eruptions at points such as the Boudican rebellion. In the
absence of Roman rule, belligerence flared up between the increasingly insular kingdoms,
demonstrating that ‘the national character may have proved ultimately indomitable, but this
was destructive when the civilising foreign influence weakened or was removed’ (von
Maltzahn 1991, 112).
This is not to say that Roman civic practices were wholly abandoned; the SubRoman Britons retained the meritocratic election of leaders. However, they appear to have
drawn their model in this respect from the last Roman legions stationed in Britain. Those
soldiers feared invasion from the Vandals, and ‘in tumultuous manner set up Marcus …
but him not found agreeable to thir heady courses, they as hastily kill … the like they do by
Gratian a British Roman, in four Months advanc’t, ador’d, and destroy’d’ (CPW 5.1:124).
This is similar to the Sub-Roman Britons, according to whose wishes ‘kings were anointed
… not of Gods anointing, but such as were cruellest, and soon after … put to death by thir
anointers, to set up others more fierce and proud’ (CPW 5.1:140). Thus the potential flaw
in any meritocratic system of election becomes apparent: it hinges upon what is considered
meritorious by the electorate. As Don M. Wolfe points out, ‘to Milton it was axiomatic that
wicked men, slaves to their passions, would elect to office men of their own unbridled
desires’ (CPW 4:264). While for Milton democracy could minimise tyranny, the
intentional perversion of this original function by the Sub-Roman Britons has evident
lapsarian connotations. This link to the Fall is reinforced by the Britons’ descent into vice,
creating a situation in which ‘evil was embrac’d for good, wickedness honour’d and
esteem’d as virtue’ which echoes Satan’s ‘evil be thou my good’ (CPW 5.1:139; PL
4.110).
Such a lack of wisdom and virtue in civic affairs is evident in the reign of
Vortigern. Vortigern is a figure whose character certainly accords with Wolfe’s assessment
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of the Miltonic axiom of meritocracy, as he is ‘decipher’d by truer stories a proud
unfortunate Tyrant, and yet of the people much belov’d, because his vices sorted so well
with theirs’ (CPW 5.1:142). Just as the prospect of a Vandal invasion caused the last
Romans to look to their tyrannical leaders, so too the Britons ‘r[a]n to the Palace of thir
King Vortigern with complaints and cries of what they suddenly fear’d, from the Pictish
invasion’ (CPW 5.1:141). In response, Vortigern called a ‘general Council’ (CPW 5.1:142)
to decide a course of action. However, as with the meritocratic electoral process,
theoretically superior civic models can only be beneficial when they are tempered by the
wisdom to utilise them correctly. While Milton admires a system of government in which
the ruler makes decisions after taking counsel from advisors, the potential flaw is the
wisdom (or lack thereof) of the advisors and the temperament of the ruler. The virtue of
Vortigern and his advisors are evident in Milton’s observation that during his reign, ‘all
things were done contrary to public welfare and safety’ (CPW 5.1:140).
Just as the Philistines ‘call in hast for thir destroyer’ (SA 1678), Vortigern’s council
decide to invite the Saxons, a ‘barbarous and heathen Nation, famous for nothing else but
robberies and cruelties done to all thir Neighbours’ (CPW 5.1:142). This also evokes the
Readie and Easie Way, where Milton laments the ‘ignominy’ of a newly emancipated
nation that ‘should be so heartless and unwise in their counsels as not to know how to use
[freedom] … butt basely and besottedly to run their necks again into the yoke which they
have broken’ (CPW 7:428). The ramifications of the council’s decision were not lost on
Gildas, who explodes with indignation: ‘How utter the blindness of their minds! How
desperate and crass the stupidity!’ (Gildas 2002, 26). This suggestion of Vortigern’s
instrumental role in the national downfall is further supported by his exchange of the
kingdom of Kent for the daughter of Hengist, king of the Saxons. The Saxons promised to
defend the Britons, yet soon claimed ‘that thir pay is too small for the danger they undergo,
threat’ning op’n Warr unless it be augmented’ (CPW 5.1:148). Such economic shortsightedness proves to be a recurrent theme in the History, reaching its nadir when Ethelred
pays the Danes ever-increasing sums under the threat of conquest in the eleventh century.
Vortigern’s son, Guortimer, sought to rectify his father’s mistake by attempting to
expel the Saxons, and we see here a calamitous situation facilitating the emergence of
virtue, which happens throughout the History. While the Britons would successfully drive
out invaders under Alfred, at this stage they lack sufficient experience in defending
themselves and consequently, the Saxons ‘wasted without resistance almost the whole
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Land eev’n to the Western Sea, with such a horrid devastation, that Towns and Colonies …
lay altogether heap’d in one mixt ruin’ (CPW 5.1:148). Nevertheless, the nascent virtue
symbolised by Guortimer is also evinced by his people. This is surprising, as one might
expect a nation ‘whose vices sorted so well’ with those of Vortigern to applaud his
incestuous relations with his daughter, but the king was actually ‘censur’d and condemn’d
in a great Synod of Clercs and Laics’ and deposed (CPW 5.1:150).
According to the native Sub-Roman historians that are ‘in expression barbarous,’
(HoB, 81), Guortimer replaced his father on the throne and valiantly ‘thrice [drove] and
beseig’d the Saxons … fought with them fowr other Battells … [and] beat them into thir
Ships that bore them home, glad to have so scap’d and not venturing to land again for 5
years after’ (CPW 5.1:151). The Saxon account of Vortigern and Guortimer, however, is
‘far differently related’ (CPW 5.1:153). The Saxon chronicles claim that Vortigern was
deposed from the throne of Kent after losing a battle to Hengist, who went on to kill much
of the British nobility in the four battles with Guortimer. How Guortimer died is unclear,
but Hengist, ‘thus rid of his grand opposer, hearing gladly the restorement of his old
favourer, return[ed] again with great Forces’ (CPW 5.1:153). Vortigern entered into a new
treaty with Hengist but was betrayed at a feast, where the Saxons ‘dispatch’d with those
Poniards every one his next man, to the number of 300. the cheif of those that could do
ought against [Hengist] either in Counsel or in Field’ (CPW 5.1:154).
The eradication of Vortigern’s peers is a crucial event in the struggle towards
national grace, as the Britons display virtue more frequently from this point. The ill-judged
decisions made by Vortigern’s council support a comparison to the justification of civil
insurrection in Paradise Lost: ‘the war in Heaven is an indication that this civic sphere was
not wholly perfect, and the purgation of its decadent elements is the first step in its
renovation’ (Riebling 1996, 587). Such renovation can be seen in the reign of the early
Saxon king Ethelbert. Ethelbert is the first explicit advocate of ideological, and particularly
religious, toleration in the History. He is particularly receptive of foreign ideas, as
demonstrated by his speech to Augustine of Canterbury and his missionaries:
[Christianity] being new and uncertain, I cannot hastily assent to, quitting the
Religion which from my Ancestors, with all the English Nation, so many years I
have retained. Nevertheless because ye are strangers, and have endur’d so long a
journey, to impart us the knowledge of things, which I perswade me you believe to
be the truest and the best, ye may be sure we shall not recompence you with any
183
molestation, but shall provide rather how we may friendliest entertain ye; nor do we
forbid whom ye can by preaching gain to your belief. (CPW 5.1:188)
Despite his initial hesitation, Ethelbert is soon ‘convinc’t by [the missionaries’] good life &
miracles, [and] became Christian’ (CPW 5.1:189).
Ethelbert’s conversion demonstrates the crucial shift in the British epistemological
attitude which takes place in the Early Saxon period. During the Roman occupation, the
assimilation of Roman practices into British society can be largely attributed to the
immense duration of Roman ubiquity in all aspects of British life. Yet, the Britons rapidly
discarded many Roman customs after the withdrawal, demonstrating they had only
superficially penetrated into British culture.
In the early Saxon period, conversely, Christianity was promulgated by a
comparatively minute group of missionaries who initially lacked any real power, preaching
in direct opposition to an ancient religion that was thoroughly ingrained in the native
culture. In spite of this, the early Saxons eschewed the passive assimilative approach of the
Roman Britons in favour of an active methodology through which virtue is persistently
sought out and judged on its pragmatic merit, and as Hugh Jenkins has pointed out, ‘the
Saxons are not so much converted as they are willing converts’ (1995, 319). Moreover,
Ethelbert understood ‘that Christian Religion ought to be voluntary, not compell’d (CPW
5.1:189), and Milton would concur.
The History also suggests a connection between the transition from the perceived
barbarism of paganism to Christianity and the progression between established and
innovative modes of government. In Ethelbert’s reign there is a shift from the traditional
autocratic rule of kings towards a proto-commonwealth style of government. He was ‘the
first Christian King of the Saxons, and no less a favourer of all civility in that rude age. He
gave Laws and Statutes after the example of Roman Emperors, written with the advice of
his sagest Counsellors, but in the English tongue, and observ’d long after’ (CPW 5.1:1956). The effectiveness of Roman modes of government leads Ethelbert to use them as a
template upon which he collates the views of his advisers in an attempt to discern the best
course of action. Yet, these laws were written not in the language of Rome, but in English,
which illustrates his awareness that wise conduct is rooted in adaptation of foreign
practices, not mere adulatory mimicry. Moreover, the proto-humanist emphasis on
vernacular language signifies that the perpetual refinement of national conduct is
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facilitated by the proliferation, rather than the deprivation, of knowledge.135 The lasting
efficacy of Ethelbert’s synthetic and flexible approach is made clear by his laws being
‘observed long after’, recalling the Molmutine Laws of Dunwallo which were ‘famous
among the English to this day’. Indeed, Jenkins has suggested that ‘Ethelbert becomes the
emblem for the virtues of the Saxons’ (1995, 319).
Ethelbert’s legislative innovations were also reflected in his treatment of the clergy,
which starkly contrasts with Vortigern’s conduct. Milton laments the corruption and
hypocrisy of the Vortigernian Britons, who ‘punish rigorously them that rob by the high
way; but those grand Robbers that sit with them at Table, they honour and reward. They
give alms largely, but in the face of thir Alms-deeds, pile up wickedness to a far higher
heap’ (CPW 5.1:174). Milton’s description of the clergy under Vortigern would not have
been out of place in Considerations, as he attacks the Sub-Roman clergy as ‘Pastors in
Name, but indeed Wolves; intend upon all occasions, not to feed the Flock, but to pamper
and well line themselves: not call’d but seising on the Ministry as a Trade, not a Spiritual
Charge’ (CPW 5.1:175). Conversely, the frugality of the Christian missionaries who
arrived during Ethelbert’s reign ‘won many; on whose bounty and the Kings, receiving
only what was necessary, they subsisted’ (CPW 5.1:189). Similarly, unlike Vortigern’s
exploitation of both the church and the laity, Ethelbert’s ‘special care was to punish those
who had stoln ought from Church or Churchman’ (CPW 5.1:196).
While Ethelbert was the first British king to embrace a foreign religion, Offa, a
‘strenuous and suttle King’ of Mercia (CPW 5.1:244), was the first to adapt British
economic practices to international factors. Offa ‘had much intercourse with Charles the
Great, at first enmity, to the interdicting of commerce on either side, at length much amity
and firm League’ (CPW 5.1:245). Charlemagne’s conquests were instrumental in the
creation of ‘the first European unity’ (Riché 1993, xvii), and his coinage reforms replaced
the gold standard sous coined by merchants with royally sanctioned silver coins (Campbell
et al. 1991, 118). When Charlemagne prohibited the use of foreign coins in the Frankish
empire, Offa, recognising the importance of international trade to British prosperity,
changed the weight and composition of English coins ‘to make [them] more acceptable
abroad’ (Sutherland 1973, 12).
135
We are reminded here of Milton’s hope in Considerations that building more provincial schools and
libraries will spread ‘the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all extreme parts,
which now lie num and neglected, [and] would soon make the whole nation more industrious, more
ingenious at home, more potent, more honourable abroad’ (CPW 7:460).
185
Yet, as throughout the History, progression is inevitably and swiftly followed by
disaster, and in 789, ‘a new and fatal revolution of calamity’ (CPW 5.1:242) began: the
Danish invasions. In keeping with the economic motivations of invaders throughout the
History, Milton describes the Danes as ‘wanderers at Sea, who … through love of spoil, or
hatred of Christianity, seeking booties on any land of Christians, came by chance, or
weather, on this shore’ (CPW 5.1:242). The persistent ascription of economic motivations
to invaders is further apparent in the Britons’ initial misidentification of the Danes as
‘Foren Merchants’ (CPW 5.1:242).
As elsewhere in the History, Milton views this invasion as divine punishment for
degeneracy, claiming that the Saxons of this period evince ‘all the same vices which
Gildas alleg’d of old to have ruin’d the Britains’ (CPW 5.1:256). He emphasises the
cyclical process of invasion, assimilation, progression, and atavism which pervades the
History: ‘the Saxons were now full as wicked as the Britans were at their arrival, brok’n
with luxurie and sloth, either secular or superstitious; for laying aside the exercise of Arms,
and the study of all vertuous knowledge, some betook them to over-worldly or vitious
practice, others to religious Idleness and Solitude’ (CPW 5.1:259).
The bi-directional nature of cultural osmosis discussed earlier is also present here;
invaders become like those they subjugate, just as the Britons adopt the characteristics of
their conquerors. These two concepts of cultural osmosis and cyclical progression
amalgamate in Milton’s description of how ‘in this invasion, Danes drove out Danes, thir
own posterity. And Normans afterwards, none but antienter Normans’ (CPW 5.1:258).
This creates a fundamental shift in the mechanics of invasion, by which the usual
definition of one nation conquering another is no longer applicable; rather, nations begin to
conquer themselves. The perpetual invasions of the History and the consequent fusion of
cultural identities gradually erode the distinctions between the people of Britain and those
of Denmark or Normandy.136
Milton’s recognition of the gradual dissolution of ethnic difference is also
contemporaneous with the Britons’ first explicitly civil conquests. The kingdoms of the
heptarchy were akin to distinct countries, yet the elimination of these long-established
boundaries – both literal and figurative – by the first kings of the Late Saxon period forged
a more unified people of Britain. The identity of the nation produced by the amalgamation
136
Racial commixture was causing anxiety when Milton wrote, as the first law prohibiting miscegenation
was passed in Maryland in 1664 (Browne 1873, 1:534).
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of the heptarchy is aptly described by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s assessment of the 12th
century postcolonial anxieties of Gerald of Wales: ‘[Gerald explores] how both Wales and
England were changed when two bodies formed a third that carries with it something of
both parents without fully being either’ (Cohen 2000, 93).
In 800, King Ecbert united England’s ‘seaven Kingdoms into one’ (CPW 5.1:248),
but this event is calamitous for a federalist like Milton. He opposes the unification of the
heptarchy, claiming that the Danish invasion,
Perhaps, had the Heptarchie stood divided as it was, had either not bin attempted,
or not uneasily resisted; while each Prince and people, excited by thir nearest
concernments, had more industriously defended thir own bounds, then depending
on the neglect of a deputed Governour, sent of-times from the remote residence of a
secure Monarch. (CPW 5.1:258)
While in Book 2 Milton cited civil divisions as one of the reasons for British capitulation
to the Roman invasion, here he states the contrary. This suggests that by this stage of
economic development, Milton believes centralised control becomes an ineffective and
unnecessary hindrance.
The ferocity of the Danish invasion renders this period the darkest of the entire
History, and yet we also see here Milton’s recurrent emphasis on the connection between
crisis and the emergence of virtue. It is into this apparently hopeless situation that Alfred
the Great makes his entrance, and the notion of a leader who appears at a time of national
need being a redemptive gift from God recalls the Second Defence: ‘there is nothing in
human society more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason, nothing in the state
more just, nothing more expedient, than the rule of the man most fit to rule. (CPW 4:671).
Here, the country may be compared to Samson, ‘that self-begott’n bird … / That revives,
reflourishes, then vigorous most / When most unactive deem’d’ (SA 1699; 1704-5).
The opening of the History highlighted the weak sense of nationhood which
accompanies vague or wholly absent historical records, but ‘the story of Alfred was well
authenticated and relatively free of legend’ (Sasek 1956, 6), mirroring the national potency
which emerges during his reign. Alfred’s power was such that he ‘gave Battel to the whole
Danish power, and put them to flight’ (CPW 5.1:280), and we see his appeal to Milton,
insofar as Alfred exhibits the ‘strong executive presence [which] is a legitimate part of the
187
ideal state as envisioned by civic humanists’ (Riebling 1996, 584). Alfred’s recognition of
the teleological value of war reflects Milton’s belief that ‘he whose just and true valour use
the necessity of Warr and Dominion, not to destroy but to prevent destruction, to bring in
liberty against Tyrants, Law and Civility among barbarous Nations, … fails not to continue
through all Posterity, over Envy, Death, and Time, also victorious.’ Milton subscribes to
the notion of just, necessary conquest in the History just as he had in the Observations
upon the Articles of Peace (1649).
Alfred recognised that ‘the want of Shipping and neglect of Navigation, had
expos’d the Land to these Piracies,’ so he built a fleet to repel the Danes (CPW 5.1:277).
This consolidation of the navy is similar to that of the 1650s, and in particular the problems
of Dutch privateering in both the Indies and the English Channel. Yet, we must remember
that while Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates (1726) described them as men
‘who were abandoned to all vice, and lived by rapine’ (Johnson 1999, 527), they were
remarkably innovative in terms of using democratic election to limit abuses. An
eighteenth-century pirate testified that ‘most of them having suffered formerly from the illtreatment of officers, provided thus carefully against any such evil now they had the choice
in themselves … for the due execution thereof they constituted other officers besides the
captain; so very industrious were they to avoid putting too much power into the hands of
one man’ (Hayward 1874 [1735], 1:42).
This ‘institutional separation of powers aboard pirate ships predated its adoption by
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century governments’ (Leeson 2007, 1066), and thus we see
that pirates demonstrate the ability to learn from past abuses of power, an ability which
remained frustratingly elusive for the Britons. This is not to say, however, that the Saxons
were wholly impotent in this regard. In the tenth century, Ælfric of Eynsham wrote that
‘the people has the choice to choose as king whom they please’ (Whitelock 1956, 642),
and the witenagemot, although being ‘composed of the aristocratic elite created by
monarchy’ (Liebermann 1925, 19), nevertheless possessed the power to depose tyrannical
kings, as happened in 757 and 774 (Chadwick 1905, 362-3).
Like Gildas and Milton, Alfred also acknowledged the congruence between civil
virtue and knowledge, as in order to ensure the efficacy of the witenagemot he ‘permitted
none unlern’d to bear office’ (CPW 5.1:290). Nevertheless, Alfred recognised the
importance of foreign influences, as he put aside a third of his revenue ‘in readiness to
releive or honour Strangers according to thir worth, who came from all parts to see him
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and to live under him’ (CPW 5.1:291). He was not, however, solely concerned with the
education of the ruling classes. As far as was possible in an age of extremely limited
literacy, he ‘thirsted after all liberal knowledge … [and] leasure he found sometimes, not
only to learn much himself, but to communicate therof what he could to his people, by
translating Books out of Latin into English’ (CPW 5.1:290). One of the texts translated by
Alfred is ‘Beda’s history’ (CPW 5.1:290), an act which literally expresses the synthesis of
Miltonically admirable historiography and its dispersal to the people. Indeed, as ‘he alone
is to be called great who either performs or teaches or worthily records great things’ (CPW
6:601), Alfred’s appellation is apt in that he both performs great things and teaches the
‘worthily record[ed]’ texts of Bede.
The need to balance the diverse concerns of skilful kingship required Alfred’s
‘wiser husbanding of time’ (Hoxby 1998, 149), which is reflected in Milton’s claim that
there was ‘no man then hee more frugal of two pretious things in mans life, his time and
his revenue; no man wiser in the disposal of both’ (CPW 5.1:291). This contrasts with the
profligacy of Vortigern, who was ‘covetous, lustful, luxurious, and prone to all vice;
wasting the public Treasure in gluttony and riot’ (CPW 5.1:142). Alfred was also the first
to engage England in long-distance international trade, sending a bishop to India who
returned laden with ‘many rich Gems and Spices’ (CPW 5.1:292), and this ‘first
intercourse that took place between England and Hindostan’ (Pauli 1857, 146) is an early
instance of the spice trade which was so central to Milton’s time.
The praise of Alfred’s polymathic virtues also has remarkable similarities to the
panegyric treatment of Oliver Cromwell in the Second Defence. Milton begins by asserting
that Cromwell was ‘sprung from renowned and illustrious stock’ (CPW 4:666), just as
Alfred is ‘of noble descent’ (CPW 5.1:289). Interestingly, it is only around the late Saxon
period, when the concept of pure Englishness was becoming assimilated into the
conglomerate, pan-European national identity, that Milton begins to mention the nobility
of provenance.
Following Alfred’s death, the progress achieved during his reign appeared to have
some lasting efficacy. The Britons demonstrated a new resistance to Danish raids, as the
‘Countrypeople inur’d now to such kind of incursions, joining stoutly together, fell upon
the spoilers, recover’d thir own goods, with some booty from thir Enemies’ (CPW
5.1:297). This progress was mirrored by King Edgar, who ‘had no War all his Reign; yet
allways well prepar’d for War, govern’d the Kingdom in great Peace, Honour, and
189
Prosperity’ (CPW 5.1:321). Edgar was able to use this prosperity wisely, giving King
Kened of the Scots ‘many rich presents’ (CPW 5.1:324) to consolidate their
rapprochement.
While Edgar is notable for using his gold wisely, Ethelred the Unready did quite
the opposite, and his ‘sluggish and ignoble vices’ would prove to be ‘a fatal mischeif of the
people, and the ruin of his Country’ (CPW 5.1:331).137 Following an intensification of
Danish incursions which could not be resisted by the dilapidated English armies and navy,
Ethelred ‘thought best for the present to buy that with Silver which [the English] could not
gain with thir iron; and Ten Thousand pound was paid to the Danes for peace’ (CPW
5.1:335). However, the short-sightedness of Ethelred’s plan was clear, as it simply taught
the Danes ‘the ready way how easiest to come by more’ (CPW 5.1:335).
Now knowing ‘how to milk such easie kine’ (CPW 5.1:342), the Danes soon
demanded more money and Ethelred paid £16,000 before being subjected to further Danish
rampages. Ethelred raised an army in response, but, in a parallel to the mismanagement of
resources in the Anglo-Dutch wars, ‘the unskillfull Leaders not knowing what to do with it
when they had it, did but drive out time, burd’ning and impoverishing the people,
consuming the publick treasure, and more imboldning the Enemy, then if they had sat quiet
at home’ (CPW 5.1:338).With his ineffective army swiftly crushed, Ethelred paid £24,000,
and soon £36,000 ‘out of the people over all England, already half beggared, was extorted
and paid’ (CPW 5.1:339; 342).
Ethelred’s inability to resist foreign invaders is reflected by a shift in the effect of
foreign influence on the Britons. From this point, the Britons move into a state of apathetic
weakness, no longer judiciously adopting what is beneficial from foreign practices, but
instead wholly abandoning their own traditions in favour of those of another culture: ‘then
began the English to lay aside thir own antient Customes, and in many things to
imitate
French manners … asham’d of thir own’ (CPW 5.1:377). The immediate consequence of
the appropriation of French customs is a profound degeneracy of the national character,
and shortly before the Norman Conquest, ‘the clergy … had lost all good literature and
Religion, scarse able to read and understand thir Latin Service … the great men giv’n to
gluttony and dissolute life, made a prey of the common people’ (CPW 5.1:402). This
137
Ethelred’s epithet is a mistranslation of unræd, meaning ‘lacking good counsel’ (Toller 1921, 737), a
word used to refer to the Fall in a 9th century Anglo-Saxon poem known as Genesis A (Krapp 1931, p.3,
l.30). Parallels between Genesis A and Paradise Lost have been suggested (Evans 1968, 144-8), and the
manuscript to which Genesis A belongs was published by Milton’s friend, Franciscus Junius, in 1655.
190
evokes Paradise Regained, where Jesus questions the possibility of freedom for such
depraved people: ‘What wise and valiant man would seek to free / These thus degenerate,
by themselves enslav’d, / Or could of inward slaves make outward free?’ (PR 4.143-5).
The connection between internal and external subjugation is reiterated by Milton’s
suggestion that the British adoption of French customs was ‘a presage of thir subjection
shortly to that people’ (CPW 5.1:377).
In spite of this, we still find virtue in figures such as Edward the Confessor, son of
Ethelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that
‘the whole nation chose Edward to be king’ (Garmonsway 1955, 163), and Milton notes
that ‘his Laws held good and just, and long after desir’d by the English of thir Norman
Kings, are yet extant’ (CPW 5.1:392). He was ‘at Table not excessive,’ and his moderate
appetite was reflected in his ‘Alms-deeds,’ the importance of which he emphasised as he
‘exhorted the Monks to like Charitie’ (CPW 5.1:392).
His successor, Harold Godwinson, son of Godwin Earl of Wessex and the Swede
Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, shared many of the virtues of Edward the Confessor, as he
‘endeavour’d to make good Laws, repeal’d bad, became a great Patron to Church and
Churchmen, courteous and affable to all reputed good, a hater of evill doers, charg’d all his
officers to punish Theeves, Robbers, and all disturbers of the peace, while he himself by
Sea and Land labourd in the defence of his Country’ (CPW 5.1:394). However, Milton’s
praise is undermined by the suggestion that Harold was motivated by ‘ambition,’ and
‘began to frame himself by all manner of compliances to gain affection’ (CPW 5.1:394).
Milton reports that William the Conqueror ‘restrein’d his Army from wast and
spoil, saying that they ough to spare what was thir own,’ although he questions the truth of
this claim (CPW 5.1:398). Beyond the description of William as an ‘out-landish
Conquerer’ (CPW 5.1:402), Milton is strangely silent about his character or conduct.
Instead, he devotes the concluding pages of the History to lamenting the avarice of the
monks and the degeneracy of the populace, leaving his final assessment of the ultimate
expression of foreign influence – foreign rule – tantalisingly unresolved. It is crucial,
however, not to allow the final national regression which closes the History to undermine
the immense achievements that precede it, as Milton does not intend to ‘blur or taint the
praises of thir former actions and liberty well defended’ (CPW 5.1:328).
The History is, in many respects, similar to Paradise Lost, as they are both texts in
which lament and joy are profoundly imbricated. Yet, ‘nothing here is for tears’ (SA 1721),
191
as the History is not merely a jeremiad of failed attempts to cast off malignant foreign
yokes, nor is it a straightforward celebration of a thousand years of national turmoil. There
is ‘no “ready and easy way” to establish a perfect and stable society; there is only a
difficult and tragic way’ (Radzinowicz 1978, 108), but when the events of the History are
teleologically considered, it becomes apparent that the text emphasises the crucial role
played by foreign influence in a millennium-long progression towards national virtue,
suggesting that ‘perfection may gradually emerge out of the turbulence of history’
(Loewenstein 1990, 15).
While the History repeatedly constitutes the flaws of the Britons in terms of excess,
it is this same desire to consume which motivates every group of invaders. The level of
sophistication achieved by the Britons at each stage in the text is also intimately related to
the development of their economic practices. The Boudican rebels are hostile to foreigners
and are also economically primitive, neglecting agriculture and living from hunting, with
disastrous consequences. The Sub-Roman Britons, recognising the value of foreign
assistance, invite the Romans and then the Saxons, although they still lack economic
continence. The early Saxon toleration of Christian missionaries evinces a willingness to
engage with foreign ideas, while Offa’s reformation of the mint demonstrates his
recognition of England’s place within the wider European market. In the late Saxon period,
the increasingly international nature of English economic conduct is reflected in the
hybridisation of national identity. Many kings of this period, whom Milton finds to be the
most laudable of the entire History, are the products of international marriages. This
gradual intermingling of European cultural identities fashions a nation which is, somewhat
paradoxically, unique in its ethnic hybridity.
It is, however, this very dissolution of national boundaries that leads to the
complete appropriation of foreign customs after Alfred’s death. Whereas the nation had
hitherto adopted foreign practices only after being invaded, the loss of Alfred’s judgement
was keenly felt as the Britons’ mimicry of the French presaged the Norman Conquest. The
postmortal acquisition of grace promised Paradise Lost is a state from which there is no
possibility of return. Civic grace lacks this eschatological finality and immutability, and
consequently, its attainment and retention is highly precarious. The struggle entailed in
reaching and remaining in the fragile state of greater national perfection accounts for the
wax and wane dynamic of the History, although this dynamic operates within an
overarching structure of gradual progression.
192
Milton’s contemporaries achieved considerable progress regarding the adaptation
and assimilation of foreign ideas, which is manifest in seventeenth-century developments
in economic theory and practice. However, such progression was stilted, and Milton’s
survey of the national state in both history and contemporaneity demonstrates that the sole
apparently immutable constant of the British national character is the desire to regress into
the old ways. As he became only too aware in his lifetime, this trait causes every moment
of national achievement to teeter on the brink of atavism, and he was troubled by the same
questions which led Melville to muse some two centuries later, ‘there is no steady
unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last
one pause … but once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, mens,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more?’ (Melville
1962, 486).
193
Conclusion
The economic and theological tracts written during the 1620s and 1630s exerted a lasting
influence on Milton’s thought. Misselden’s Circle of Commerce depicted both trade and
investment as circular processes, and in England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade Mun
eloquently and empirically emphasised that gold stockpiled was squandered and that it
should always be put to use. Covenant theologians preached in terms accessible to their
commercially aware congregations, refiguring man and God as tenant and landlord, with
Jesus standing, as he would in Paradise Lost, as guarantor.
Milton was, of course, not the first to respond to contemporary economic and
theological thought in his literary work. Jonson’s Staple of Newes, which Milton likely saw
performed six years before his own first published work, would have had particular appeal
to the usurer’s son since the play interrogates contemporary attitudes towards usury and
monopolies, both topics of enduring interest to Milton. In The Temple, Herbert wrestles
with covenant theology, and his attempts to reconcile materiality and spirituality ends in
the recognition that the sacred and profane cannot be separated.
Comus takes up the Staple of Newes’s satire of monopolies, subverting the masque
tradition by showing the Lady’s sexual hoarding to be not only ineffective but harmful.
The History of Moscovia transposes the Lady’s attitude on to the Russian nation,
demonstrating – in keeping with Misselden and Mun – that the accumulation of gold leads
not to profit but to degeneracy. Degenerate prophets populate Of Reformation, where
Milton attacks a clergy that seek to both hoard and consume, at great cost to their flocks.
This submission to covetousness was Winstanley’s primary concern in Fire in the
Bush, in which the Fall is a daily danger, occurring when people seek fulfilment outside
themselves in private property, hire and possessions. The First Defence develops
Winstanley’s concern regarding hire, with Milton attacking Salmasius for being a covetous
mercenary. Considerations addresses the avarice of the clergy, while the Readie and Easie
Way blames the greed of the English for their failure to govern themselves.
In the Christian Doctrine we see the influence of English covenant theologians in
Milton’s representation of salvation as Jesus’ payment of man’s debt to God. Paradise Lost
is the clearest exposition of Milton’s economic soteriology, with the mechanics of
salvation repeatedly couched in economic terms. There is a clear parallel between the
194
gradual unfolding of Adam’s teleological understanding and Misselden and Mun’s urging
their readers to understand that apparent loss could eventually return as future profit.
Just as fallen man must rely on Jesus’ intercession, so too the ancient Britons are
‘self-deprav’d’ (PL 3.130). While they are ‘progenitors not to be glori’d in’ (CPW 5.1:61),
the History shows the Britons being gradually refined by successive invasions, which both
introduce new practices and ideas from abroad and provide opportunities for native virtue
to emerge. Milton long held an admiration for the Dutch, and many of the tracts published
by his countrymen before the publication of the History voiced a similar desire for open
borders and open minds. The History should take its place among them.
But Milton’s belief that there was much to be learned from foreign minds also
presented one of the major obstacles encountered writing this thesis: a mere monoglot like
myself cannot hope to do full justice to a man who could read ‘Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Aramaic, Syriac, Italian, French, Spanish, [and] Dutch’ (Hale 1997, 8). While it is unlikely
that many important economic treatises were written in Aramaic, my lack of Latin has
been keenly felt at points, since ‘all the most vigorous disciplines of early modern
intellectual culture were international and hence still conducted through Latin’ (Hale 1998,
4). Being limited to using only texts available in English translation, it is likely that I have
overlooked other writers and works that would either support or undermine my argument.
Nonetheless, I hope to have opened up the economics of Milton’s soteriology for future
study, and I concur with Winstanley by concluding hopefully that ‘though this Platform be
like a peece of Timber rough hewd, yet the discreet workmen may take it, and frame a
handsome building out of it’ (WCW 2:288).
195
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